Alycia Pirmohamed

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I Ask the Garden

I set her down in the garden. This other me
who is kinder to her body. The suggestion of ink
warms the sky.

This is how we steady the other:
ten years ago, I avoided stepping on yellow
wildflowers.

Oregon was rock after rock after rock
as if taunting the limit of the sea. I sifted
sand in Florence

and thought of my lover laughing.
There are good sounds on this earth, I told myself
as the moon’s reflection

lost itself in water. I lose myself too,
like a crop of disobedient milkweed. Rock after
rock watches

with eye after eye after eye—I extend
like smoke and exhaustion. I ask the garden
who waters her.

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ALYCIA PIRMOHAMED is the author of Another Way to Split Water, Hinge, Faces that Fled the Wind, and the collaborative essay, Second Memory. She received an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh.