by Mara Grayson
Somewhere a village
has been invaded
by wasps, sent
there by aristocrats
for the purposes
of biological control.
Caught below
this village, where
a new nest lurks,
there are stingers rising
from the dirt, like old
solitary flowers, now
born between
two slats of wood,
those the people fused
beneath their feet –
browning, bunioned,
carrying the body politic,
burdens
and saviors, both.
Hands, like feet:
the meaning-
-making of the earth,
embodied in the day-
to-day. They’ll learn eventually
what nurtures
the strawberry wreaks havoc
on the picker’s palm.
In the corner, quilt-
covered as the winter
sits a mother who is hungry
for the moon.
Diligence has stained
her fingers as beetroots
in fibrous jackets,
uniform-thick, adorned
with epaulettes
and calluses, touch that
teases daylight
as she plants her hands
in everything unrooted,
endless as choices,
all the same.
When her daughter, one
day, tells the story,
the people will have had
strong feet
and the wasps
will have been temporary,
will have tired
of the village and retreated
from its sudden scarcity.
Above this village
the sun will still glow red:
Absence will
soon spring the earth
awake, pulling her
along its orbit,
while the beetroot
and the strawberry deliberate
over which
shall inherit
the cone-shaped open
mouth of dirt.
Mara Lee Grayson work has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia Journal, Fiction, Mobius, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, West Trade Review, and other publications. Her poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. An award-winning scholar of rhetorics of racism and antisemitism in higher education, Grayson is the author of two books of nonfiction. She holds an MFA from The City College of New York and a PhD from Columbia University. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Grayson resides in Southern California, where she is a faculty member at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Website: maragrayson.com. Twitter: @maraleegrayson.