Hacked Back (poem)

Hacked Back

To be a bramble, a little difficult, let one discern

Your bloom

This often said of you, in catalogues, powder blue

Your sprouted canes

No artist—not this one sitting here

Much appreciates

Stems with prickers, gets their woolen things entrapped

Their fingertips

A piece of you pushed in along a fencerow

Every post

Every post heats in the sun and hosts a vine

Junk I am

Says she, but that, as to reasons, I discount

Watercolorists don’t

Care for my sort of flower, tricky to get right

I was planted

Is what I say, for being wanted, pies, all that

The honeysuckle

Gets in thick and neither of us cares

Vagabondish

Treats, for children of the world

Not elites

Why not, bipeds, more consumptive and unique

One to one

Soft-shelled…nosey though…treading lug-soled

Boots on nature

She strews spiked and clawed things, jellies, toads

Hundred-legged

Docents of the soil the chronicler of a spring day

Spot to spot

Jerks her hand from a plumping thistledown

Spills her water pot

Hacked Back

This Game the Product

(2019, Stephanie Foster)