for Theresa

Ravenswood.

Spackled in moss-hatched, epiphytic splendor, humidity

gathers the fine hairs along restless limbs—me too,

alternately thin, curly, heavily scaled, on my bench, my

back, my guard; the chain linked curls of the Spaniard’s

beard, pendants spiral upward through bald cypress,

branching sunlight, slendering along silver tendrils—we

grow aerial roots and shelter beneath the wings of live oak.

No air. Innocent. Still—cousin-ness bonding us against older

kid oppression—

Snap!

Her ancient shadow upon us, the tyrant with her

unpredictable rule: Stops time. Her own arcana of offensives

blistering us ‘til we glisten, in what followed, afternoon

punishment—

(like evangelical Sunday explosions, corporal fathers and

soldier uncles who flared like lightning)—

but herself predictable as the afternoon storm, thundered

and struck at the nursery, her incubator, reckoning to fill a

quota of injury by inflicting upon us enough to match her

own.

Originally published in Alocasia, May 2025, Issue 13.

The Nursery