once mourning doves made me think
of graveyards today they peck
at weed seeds clean my land the oldest
on record lived thirty years
and four months from the time
it was tagged until it was shot
how many mates did it mourn
American toads breed at the neighbor’s pond
I wring laundry to hang on a clothesline mostly black
when I was eight a man trapped me
in the stairwell to our New York apartment
the note from his pocket loose-leaf cutout
blue ink print said I was beautiful a scalpel in his pocket
how many would die in a war without weapons
I was born in the middle of an Andean
hurricane the first time
I saw Mamá her blue eyes reflected green
from the flame of a candle
the last time in Florida her eyes were shut
yesterday Aaron and I planned
a garden for our new Connecticut home
asparagus and blueberries can’t be harvested
for two years seeds must avoid hickory
taproots cilantro has to be
direct-seeded doesn’t like to be moved
my sister bought her first house after med school
lived there twenty-five years before renting it out
I’ve moved twenty-five times from rental to rental
clouds dissipate on our ridge
we buy spades trowels pruners window sheers
fog on the trees lingers coats the open grass
droplets vaporize burn the fog
how does one quench an instinct to bolt
Cultivo
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, translator, and educator. Her honors include a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her work has also been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Luisa’s poems appear or are forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review, Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011, RHINO, Diode Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, the Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere.