the garden girl of Willow Brook

the garden girl of Willow Brook

She presses down with nail and thumb then twists,

feeling more than hearing the throaty pop

of offspring separating from source. She doesn’t

ask for much: a six-by-seven plot

walled off with two-by-fours that she can call

her own, a neatly planted row of rose,

a line of daisy sprouts, between it all

the musky scent of soil.

                                    The neighbors know

she’ll be there afternoons, a sort of monument

to life in Willow Brook. The kids are told

to look but not to touch the figure roped in

the garden’s twine. I bet she bites, they joke.

From small-town whispers their parents know

the day she cracked.

     She left that morning

for the doctor in the city, her bloated

belly holding the farm-boy’s seed, returning

late that afternoon an empty pod.

The pastel ladies who pack the back-right pew

in floppy hats agree it was best, that God

will judge a girl who lures a man to sow

his oats outside the marriage bed; they nod

and say it’s better that baby died than live

as source of shame. But others claim she pinched

the sprout herself, uprooting that which did not fit.

On hands and knees all day she works

her soil, plucking out the weedy shoots

that try to choke the flowers she’s staked

in soldiered lines. I heard she’s forced to root

in fertile dirt as penance for her sin,

but others swear she’s just the garden lady

in faded corduroys who compulsively tends

her plot, swearing to make her plants fit neatly

inside a walled-in world where she retains control.