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

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Fern at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital

I didn’t know it was live
until a child began picking
leaves from the fronds,
letting them drop to the floor
like those long hospital minutes.

No one stopped her, bent as we were
to our tight economy of form paperwork,
hoping if we fill it right, insurance will
come through this time.

I’d been so often I could recite
the questions asked in neat typed rows.
The TV, above us like the eye of God,
kept up its own bright conversation.

The fern, just at child height,
was finally picked bare, a frond
spindling out—as if to mark
for us all the writing on the wall.

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