Garden in Sachsen-Anhalt
Erin Calabria
This July bore so few apricots
they fell without us noticing
and exhaled silver tents of mold
over the grass
till the rain washed them under
Meanwhile the Zwetschge tree
that last year broke its highest branches
under a weight of plums
creaks low again in the shortening light
feral fruit beaded with sticky gold
wherever worms have burrowed in
The other day my mother told me how
her grandfather once worked as a chemist here
before the war and the bombers came
and shelled the city to the ground
I told her how we had followed
chain-link fences fleeced with clematis
in the shadow of those abandoned plants
still
rising huge
and vacant
and almost whole
north along the Elbe
The couple who tended this garden before
tells us we should slice the hard plums thin
and bake them strewn with sugar
over a dough made with yeast
till they become soft and sweet
till they become something else
All this time I’ve just wanted to know so badly
how long you can carry the pulse
of another time zone in the blood
counter rhythm like a pair of metronomes
slowly untwinning their knocks
as if to re-sound again and again
there is always some other place to go back to
as if to run a rip current
against the irreversible drain of hours
In spring
at the end of the line
on Kastanienstraße
in a housing estate crosshatched
with empty clotheslines
a friend let fall
falafel in a crackling pot
and on his shelf saved
two chocolate Santa Clauses wrapped in foil
He said
they are waiting for my children
he said
but they do not come
Outside the chestnuts bloomed like torches
in this place where so many now
can name the countries they have seen
in the order they walked across them
This afternoon I stooped
under the plum tree’s curling leaves and spoke
the crowded consonants that meant
not so many mothertongues ago:
of Damascus
I tossed what fruit had rotted
into bushes at the garden’s edge
the blue skin sagged and stippled orange with fungi
throbbing a vascular heat that startled
even through to gloved hands
and drew them tight to the ground
in case they might catch
some vanishing point
of sunlight already spent.
Mourning of Crows
winter evenings now they gather
on rooftops and in the trees
flapping darkly or sitting plump
and still like bird-shaped fruit
meanwhile I stay perched in that morning
we’d forgotten to turn the clocks back
when I woke in your brother’s old room
surrounded by stacks of books
and curtains flossed in cold March light
it was too early and too late all at once
like all your photographs
like the fan of tabs I keep unfurling
towards the ghost your mother says she is glad
you left on the internet
crows they say will keen
and wake their dead
if only to signal threat
if only to witness a thing
they cannot know and still be
at daybreak I watch them take off in a cloud
soaring high and spooking one another
each flight trail a sine curve of mischief and joy
each wingbeat a shape
I pretend to capture
against so much daylight
no longer saved
a distance now marked
with my living.
Erin Calabria grew up in rural Western Massachusetts and currently lives in Magdeburg, Germany. Her writing was nominated for Best of the Net 2015 and selected as a winner for The Best Small Fictions 2017. You can read more of her work in Third Point Press, Atlas and Alice, Five 2 One Magazine, and other places, or find her on Twitter @Erin_Calabria.