In the Weeds

She calls my vase of zinnias weeds,

claiming they took over her garden.

I tell her I plant them each spring

and love how more flower when I cut them.

Weeds. A word that smacks of trash.

Means something to root out.

How I grew up in a trailer park is something

people tend to forget or ignore

as if mobile homes are mushroom rings

popping up to mar a field or lawn.

I get it.

As an exchange student, I called Frankfurt quiet,

too quiet because I couldn’t hear bugs.

No crickets. Not even cicadas shredding

the sky. The noise of traffic and crowds

didn’t register because I wanted, and still do,

what is wild, what blooms too much.

Everyday Water

Eye level with the swells

I can’t see the rain pock

the surface, just drops jumping

back up, dragging gulf salt

and water with them, how rain

makes ocean a field of fountains.

A pelican glides by, head pulled back

beyond her shoulders, beak jutting out,

neck bent into a “s” pipe,

the sort used for sinks, for commodes,

for flushing smut down quick.

Something in a pelican reminds me

of a woman who knows she’d look regal

if only she can keep her skirt down.

And me? I find myself everyday

wishing for a dress made of water.

Tina Mozelle Braziel won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for Known by Salt (Anhinga Press). She has also been awarded an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship, the first Magic City Poetry Festival eco-poetry fellowship, and an artist residency at Hot Springs National Park. She earned her MFA at the University of Oregon. She directs the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop for high school students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She and her husband, novelist James Braziel, live and write in a glass cabin that they are building by hand on Hydrangea Ridge. https://tinamozellebraziel.com/

Photo by Noelle Gillies on Foter.com / CC BY-SA