Forty Rows of Rosemary
“Generally speaking, a little rosemary goes a long way. This is not one of those times.”
—Sam Sifton, “Roasted Potatoes with Onions and Rosemary,” from his cookbook See You on Sunday
1 Generally speaking, a little rosemary goes
2 a long way. This is not one of those times.
3 Banckes’s Herbal, 1525, says of rosemary
4 Take the flowers thereof and make powder
5 thereof and binde it to thy right arme
6 in a linnen cloth and it shale make thee light
7 and merrie. Sounds to me like witchery, but
8 this enticing Light and merrie—yes, please,
9 these. In October the crickets still trill for mates
10 and the tomato plants still swell with fruit
11 and the pineapple sage sprouts scarlet flowers
12 but three minutes into dinner, the sun pulls
13 an Irish goodbye. Let this be the year
14 I don’t go with it. I’d submit to any conjuring.
15 Bathe and bind my whole body with rosemary.
16 Cull peppermint from the stone wall, chamomile
17 from the labyrinth, lavender from the boundary
18 markers. Gather coriander, even, in fistfuls
19 like a lover’s hair: Answer the cold and dark
20 with citrus pique, medieval aphrodisiac.
21 Culpeper, 1653: Hot in the first degree.
22 Pliny, 1469: Place it under the pillow before
23 sunrise. I myself am little, and after equinox,
24 becoming littler, would go a long way for sunrise,
25 for a potent dose of green.
26 Culpeper on rosemary:
27 The sun claims privilege in it, and it is under
28 the celestial Ram. Culpeper says of its chymical oil,
29 take one drop, two, three, as the case requires,
30 for inward griefs. Culpeper says Yet it must be
31 done with discretion, for it is very quick and piercing
32 and therefore a little must be taken at a time
33 which is to say a little goes a long way
34 unless it is one of those times, as Sifton says.
35 When sunrise ceases to be a mild postcard word.
36 Becomes a word of piquancy in the third degree
37 because it means the sun will come. Will come
38 again Light and merrie just as the season comes
39 to take a quill to recipes. Red-pen one drop
40 and write in garden-green ink: dispense freely.
Love poem as virgin cocktail recipe
The Jamaican sweet orange and Indonesian pomelo
came colliding in Barbados and made a rosy biting
juicebomb a Welsh preacher called forbidden fruit.
I don’t sugar it. I want the bitterness
as I want the bitterness of bitters, hickory dark
and botanical, once-upon-a-patent-medicine,
near obscene how it demands you dispense it
in shakes and splashes, brisk and quick
as I want the briskness of tonic water, and
give me quinine bite, not that sucrose cloy
that colonizers added when they couldn’t stomach
the mosquitoes nor the malarial remedy
and I want remedy alongside bite: soft hand
against my mouth, sleep-tea steeped early and cooled
for hours, valerian, chamomile, orange blossom,
rosebuds, rosehips, lemongrass, I want
and I want all this at nightfall, don’t blur my vision,
don’t numb a thing; ice, stir, black-cherry it,
one, two, give it mineral edge no child would covet
a sip of; but I will, and do, and offer it up to you
June Gervais’s illustrated novel Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair (Penguin Books/Penguin Random House Audio) is the coming-of-age story of a young queer woman becoming a tattoo artist in the 1980s. It has been featured in Lambda Literary’s “Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Literature,” Autostraddle’s “Rainbow Reading,” Shondaland’s “Pride Month Reading List,” and more. June’s poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Lit Hub, Writers Digest, RHINO, North American Review, Them, Sojourners, The Bennington Review, Big Fiction, The Common, Cordella, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Find her on Instagram at @june.gervais.writer or Bluesky at @junegervais.bsky.social.