Over the barbed wire, under the sweet thorniness of it, around the rootbulb, strangling the dog rose. Between clematis and snowberry. Twisted with fennel and tree of heaven. Blooming into morning glory, into knotweed. Weaving our fingers through our tangled hair. Pulling kinked strands for the nesting birds.
Blooming back into the summer spent hacking back blackberries. As we grew into machete-swingers, sunkissed, strong. Twisted into vines tough as rope, grooved deep fiber meshed in with thorns big as cat claws.
Under the best of intentions. Growing into the spiked alien-green head of the mock cucumber, blooming into a fuckage of snails. Blooming into the listening well. Blooming into the flank of the culvert. Blooming into luminous distraction. Inextricable from a boy who rappelled out of a locked quarantine third story balcony with a piece of hemp rope to come eat tangerines with you.
Held in a dying grapevine, bloomed with yeast. Inextricable from a boy who said he could make water into wine give him grapes and six weeks. Who said he would weave a crown of thorns and wear it if you told him to. Our arms cross hatched with scratches for trying
Over hedgerows, under property lines, around distinction. Between profit margins.
Tightening in this unseasonable heat, choked by its own green hunger. Choked by the attempted depiction. Blooming into the purple thrum of nightshade, fruiting into the promise of trouble. Twisted in the bottom of the milk jug.
Inextricable from the girl who stabbed me in the knee with a plastic fork after I shaved her head,
in the chaos of snow geese lifting off the field, meshed in our hands. Held in everything I’ve bought and broken. Sheltered by our own deadwood, sheltered by our own dry brush where rattlesnakes laze.
Under the foundation, around the median, where a feral cat hides her kittens in the oleander. Weaved back to bloom into every kitchen slow dance. Meshed in fishing wire and horsehair, dental floss and string. Place held in the chaos of memory, sheltered by obscurity. The rabbit tunneling through the brush. Someday I will wrestle this into song
Elizabeth Wing is a writer and trailworker based in Portland, Oregon. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, The West Marin Review, 7×7, Up North Lit, and numerous other venues. Wing wrote Entanglement under the mentorship of Joan Naviyuk Kane as part of her thesis work, I WOULD NEVER THROW A FIRECRACKER INTO DRY GRASS, BUT – at Reed College.