COMPOST

  by Cappy Love Hanson


Every evening, I cultivate 
what’s died, what I’ll become.  
Begin by dumping the day’s 
oddments:  carrot tips 
and bushy green tops, waxy 
cucumber peels, grapefruit rinds 
like half-suns.  Crushed shells 
of free-range chicken eggs, 
prismed aqua to viridian to russet.  
Coffee grounds, tea-bag leavings.  
Remnant of the black bean feast, 
tracked by scent to the back 
of the bottom refrigerator shelf, 
where it cultivates a crop 
of turquoise mold.

Into plastic trash cans they tumble 
and splat, the containers’ 
dark brown meant to magnify 
the decomposing heat, holes 
for air to trickle in and water out.  
I irrigate them as I do 
what grows in former batches:  
Japanese black pines for their
scoliotic grace; marigolds 
to fend off insects; lettuce, 
cabbage, and tomatoes, tasting 
of past lives, of finely dappled 
light beneath the shade cloth,
of my own muscle and blood
that will not last.