By Rachel Morgan
plant beans when signs are in the arms or the loins
plant beans in the head they bloom to death if you’re
going to make sauerkraut work in the arms
or the breast because if’n you make it in the head
the brine goes down to the bowels and smells like a hog pin
prefer the old moon over the new moon to plant potatoes so they don’t
grow deep and hard to dig if they get eyes pare them out
so they don’t watch you use three level tablespoons
of salt to a good gallon of chopped cabbage work the salt in
if you do it right it stays white wisdom teeth need
to be pulled below the heart so swellin’s tolerable
don’t buy an unborn baby a gift plant corn in the breast
that’a way it won’t grow so tall the wind’ll knock it over
when you set out tomatoes and peppers put a stick next to the stalk
to keep the cutworms off the plant when you mash
a cutworm after it’s eaten a plant it’ll be green put your
house shoes under the bed to keep bad ghosts away
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Rachel Morgan is the Assistant Poetry Editor for the North American Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Northern Iowa. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-edited Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press), and a letterpress chapbook of her poetry, Things We Lost in the Fire (Flag Pond Press), has been published. Recently her work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Fence, Denver Quarterly, South85 Journal, Volt, Hunger Mountain, and DIAGRAM.