Taking Space

Extend the new border
by one inch, then five.
Cut through
the thick foundational growth.
Lift in patches and pretend they form a
sky archipelago, if only they
would stay aloft. When one side sticks, dig
down and use fingers to break through
the roots I thought I wanted, though I’ve always swooned
over the clearance section of the garden center, all the red
blooms with crusted stems, brown, but still snap-green
when a branch is sacrificed. Over the month of
September, I get colored metal décor from
the dollar store, and despite their garish twang and likely loss
in the next windstorm, they hang in the two Japanese maples that
should have never been planted in the front of my small land as a warning:

I don’t need permission                         to turn this all                                                               into ashes.

____

Originally from Ontario, Canada, Loren Walker has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in poetry and selected as a finalist for the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize. Loren has published two chapbooks–viscerous, with The Offending Adam, and neverheart, with Dancing Girl Press–and poems have appeared in Free State Review, Black Fox Magazine, and Quiddity, among other publications. Identifying as neurodivergent and queer, Loren now resides in Providence, Rhode Island.