Wren Tuatha
Some Other Child’s Mimosa
Mine leaned on a white picket fence. Pink tassels
across the branches like a pom pom flashmob,
ready to dance but never getting the signal.
Here, across from the rec center, there’s a yellow
shotgun house on a double lot, the whole side parcel
for some other child’s mimosa. Grows into the sidewalk.
Roots under the street. Maps can want what they want.
It’s a rental. Welcome planned a garden. Inaction
grew a forest. College town, little summer traffic.
No kindergartener answers, I want to be a housecleaner. Defiant war drum of a bass beat drives by.
Tassels, feather duster. Junior Giants—Coaches Needed.
Playground with a security fence, as if someone
could steal play. Outside it, handmade Little Library
on a post. Books always coming, always going, always here.
From the rec center lobby bench I watch this mimosa,
circus tent, warehouse of dreams. Three kids
in a tree room, invisible to the driver parking there,
bike in the luggage rack getting tangled in low branches.
From under pink tassels or threatening ocean skies,
Three pirates ignore an ice cream truck.
Wren Tuatha is pursuing her MFA at Goddard College. Her first collection is Thistle and Brilliant (FLP). Her poetry has appeared in The Cafe Review, Canary, Sierra Nevada Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Lavender Review, and others. She's editor at Pitkin Review and Califragile, journal of climate change and social justice. Wren and partner author/activist C.T. Butler herd rescue goats in the Camp Fire burn zone
of California.