Matt Comi
We used to live below maple street bridge
west of the old cracker factory.
It’s a wine bar now, or a coffee roaster, I think.
We only had one cat. She was sitting on the roof
of our neighbor’s place.
There is no garden.
Now, we live in another valley,
with a fence, and pole beans climbing
that fence. Squash and tomatoes trellised
up an old iron cattle-gate.
We have a wooden porch with two chairs.
Two cats beneath the chairs.
There is no garden.
Sometimes I walk west of our place,
up the dirt road past the elderberry thicket
and the pastures of Hereford cattle.
Now empty, now a big buffet.
There is no garden.
Walk up, out of the valley to the cornfields,
broad as the way to hell and I can see I-59.
A thin, slate-gray ratsnake unspooling
all the way to Oklahoma, to Texas.
There is no garden.
The cicadas in the walnut tree sing louder,
dressed in trumpet flower.
The cats bring us a dead mole, a lizard
still moving, a cricket, a grasshopper, a sparrow.
They arrange the bodies in a circle, the lizard gets away.
Cut mint and catnip drying.