Marin Smith
Marin Smith holds an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her work has been published in MER Literary, Milk Art Journal, Literary Mama, Dead Flowers Poetry Rag, Considering Disability Journal, Elephant Journal, Thought Catalog, Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, and forthcoming in CALYX Journal. She is the creative nonfiction editor of Abraxas Review.
Goldenrod
Christ, those hands—dirty, thick tuber-fingers,
filthy Carhartt pants, resin-voice spouting off
scientific names of plants, and I am opening
and spreading like fireweed. His body
put out a musk so sweet and arresting
and tobacco-tinged, all I could do
as he rung me up was clutch my pot
of goldenrod and silently, slowly, selfishly inhale,
breathe what was good and leathery and sinewy
all those years ago, another man on a fence,
hammering a nail down hard with swings
that each took me out, drove me down harder
into that artemisia-studded earth. I was perched
on the precipice of personhood , finding out
so many foundational things through those hands,
flicking ash, ripping open pearlsnaps, pulling towards
me all that I wanted to know, bringing them into me,
apparently even to my own detriment and dissolving.
I breathed and then whirled back to cradling a potentiality
in the pot he had prepared. I went home, snipped the roots,
and buried the start in my untamed, weedy bed out back.
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Image by JC Siller from Unsplash
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