I am trying to grow a flower garden that will live
up to the one my mother had when I was a girl
but I am negligent. I planted the bulbs too late—
they’re bound to rot under the early heat
of the quiet southern suburb in which I’ve found
myself in the middle of my life and the squirrels
are not helping my efforts, pulling up everything
I am trying to obscure with dirt, scolding me
through mouthfuls of fetal crocus: Stupid girl,
there is no cure for death. This time, my mother
is actually dying. A squirrel who’s had his fill
wanders up an arthritic branch humming
Ave Maria, a song I’ve always hated.
Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the 2018 Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. Her new poems appear in or are forthcoming from the New Yorker, American Poetry Review and the Academy of American Poets' anthology 100 Poems that Matter. Katie is an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University.