The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve

---

First Sugar Moon of the Pandemic

Chickweed and bird’s eye speedwell recede, 
						the tiny white teeth and blue water 
					of their flowers 
giving way to hairy bittercress, purple dead-nettle. White tufts 
				flanked by dark javelins rise 
		beside dragon heads. 

Maple sap drips from sapsucker holes, and the green troll-hair 
						of onion grass pocks the lawn 

	while each answering cardinal call 
			splatters the air with a thin 
		iridescent paint, here and gone. 

When they decide it’s spring, it’s spring. Calendar be damned. 

Now, year-old sage will sprout leaves 
	from root crowns. Honeysuckle bushes 
			will crack their green fireworks.

Yonder,
a robin has been trying for ten minutes 
	to break a beakful of shredded polypropylene twine 
	 from its tangle 
	on a tomato cage.

Agricultural twine now appears in the nests 
		of an increasing number of birds, who love it 
	for its flexibility and strength, 
					who often fly in search of it, whose feet 
	    it entangles, 
			whose hatchlings

	    it orphans. Even chicks 
		get tangled, limbs becoming deformed. 

	This is not a poem about survival. 

		The robin stops tugging 
	and perches on the cage wire, 
					preening.

In a moment, I will go to the tangle 
		and she will fly away, while I cut the white 
	threads from the wire, crushing them 
in my hand.

---