The digitalis is dying. No, the datura. No, something less deadly and no less lovely: the delphinium. I forget to water it, though I mean to. It's easier to blame the rain for failing to reach under the eave, the wind for the wrong trajectory. My aphasia for the wrong spell. Easier to cast about for a correct consonant than to describe the situation of what's before me: not enough nourishment. Not enough sun. Neglect. A flaccid strain. Something beautiful limping, falling over, with a scatter of imprecise syllables tossed between me and it. Something like a dead language, or new one.
In a dusty past narrative, Brandy McKenzie has published poems in more than three dozen literary magazines, won various awards, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and worked on the editorial boards of three different nationally distributed literary magazines. These days, though, she mostly works as a paralegal, teaches critical thinking and writing to community college students, and tries to provoke conversation about strangeness of our shared waking dream.
