Sarah Mast
If I were an ace of clubs I would also
want to be stuck up in the beam of the fence
next to the ivy that, thirsty though it gets,
does what it wants in beauty.
I don’t know all the most desirable nooks
for a city-issued trash bin but nestled
amid the alley inland sea oats
doesn’t seem like a bad one.
Nothing really grows out of the packed gravel and asphalt
though it tries, and maybe the road would give way if it knew how.
The ligustrum, who goes where it wants, has no qualms
about leaning over the fence
over the Turks’ Caps and the Styrofoam scraps
to conspire with the looming pecan.
None of the nuts it drops will root through
the road paved for the garbage trucks
but the squirrels will get them
just as they get the pecans that fall in the middle of sacred nowhere,
unseen and untouched and unheard
and unadmired by humans,
like the ground
under the mine
from which the materials for this road were made.
It wants to be taken,
whatever is let go.
The trash bin, its contents,
the broken asphalt, the ace of clubs,
whatever is left—
not living, its beauty distorted—
it desires once again to be
within the whole of the “freehold of life,
triumphant.”
It would slip back under the earth,
happily possessed again, freeheld.
