Two Poems
by Brenna Womer
the weed
there’s a weed i left to grow because
it wasn’t in the way and that i let
keep growing in the periphery.
i thought it would be neat to see
if it could grow tall as me, and it did,
and then grew taller still.
it’s almost to the roof of the house
now, with a strong trunk i can’t
snap with one hand; i tried.
so, basically, it’s a tree, with leaves
and branches and a network of roots;
to uproot it is to kill a constellation,
and what right do i have, anyway,
when i dared it grow taller
than me in the first place?
two rusted chains, dangling
two rusted chains, dangling free from a tree a bench’s length apart, each attached with a wood screw, an eyebolt, bored into the branch above, the holes, once fresh traumas to the green meat, now gray-brown, healed around the entry points, the bolts a permanent fixture, embedded, would cause more harm at this point to remove, would require a re-traumatization of the tree, and it took so long for the wounds to heal over in the first place that someone has decided to leave everything be: a swing with no bench, a branch with two holes, two rusted chains, dangling
Brenna Womer is an experimental prose writer and poet in flux. She's a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University and the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and two chapbooks, Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018) and cost of living (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Story Magazine and Faculty Advisor for New Delta Review.
