Finally, the mint is up. My small ambit
of yard. Monitoring its progress.
The azalea has a few tightly furled pinks
like napkins twisted in a lap
anxiously below the dinner table.
As a child, I reveled in that territory:
under the table, in the legs. Or the secret
core of the circular rack of shirts
in the thrift store, unintentional fort.
The news says stock up, hole up,make a fort
within the fort of the town within the state, little cloth
fort around the mouth and so forth. And inside
the mind, another fort of looking
at the mint.
contributor
contributor
Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System (Ecco), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series and was listed as new and notable book by The New York Times. She is also the author of June in Eden (Oregon State University Press). She has won the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, New England Review, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at the University of Southern Indiana.
