Supply Chain

Drippingly by grips, this humus and perlite nearly sings through my fingers circling the ditch lily’s heat-sunk side, anthers frayed, fallen. Sift. Learn your footprint. If occasion, rise to. Another bloom, opposite, grows blood orange its splayed open hand, in shade, still opulent, curls tender, having the time of its life. Let’s get the basics, the survey says. Sight says, turning, the cat’s sprawled besides the baby rat it found and above the scalp thin lawn through the window the children are watching. Where do you live? What’s under your roof? What brushes up, by now, is summer burnt grass in scorch and stubble with the rat who will not move. Lent pallor. Light gray lumpen weight. How many rooms do you own? Keep digging, mom, get to china, they call out, when I work the plant free, its dirt tumbling thick with rooted tendrils reaching. Are you a gadget geek, a regular joe, or technophone? Plus crumbs, wedged in pine cones, tunnels, earthworm ruts. There’s nothing I can’t touch here if I want to or disturb, teeming sum of what we’re built on, soil damps beside dry pockets, clay at the spade end gone that unctuous apricot yellow. Refine your results. The cat’s long patient, knows what her hurt can do. She waits, ginger lines of her fur circling. What’s on your plate/ in your medicine cabinet/jewelry box/garage? I look closer. The infant rodent is trembling. Another child, not mine, labors deep to find the shine, sorting pebbles through her fingers. Make progress. Take action. Witness not permitted distance. When the prey finally moves, jumps a few inches, the cat closes in, takes the injured flaccid thing into his jaws for the kill and carries it almost like a kitten across the lawn. My hand crushes the dark stamens and the littlest child upstairs at the rat’s last squeal, begins to scream best, best, thisis the best day of my life, and I have to walk back inside.