The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Commonplace Misfortunes of Everyday Plants by Renee Emerson

---

Grapefruit Tree in Cubicle

You dug the seed, white as a tooth,
from the sour flesh and juice
of a half-grapefruit sugared
and eaten on break. Pushed it deep
with your thumb in the scoop of dirt
you stole in a Styrofoam cup
from the neglected corner office fern.

Takes some careful attention
to coax the green shoot to grow
tall as your child in the near-sunless
technology-gray cubicle
where you spent day after day
thinking up what metal and plastic
can take the place of the parts of knees
worn thin from sixty years of hard use.

When Smith and Nephew laid you off,
some decades later, you’d always say
it was the best thing you did there.

---