During sex this morning,
I thought about needing
to pull the milk thistles
from around the pink
petunias, the prickly
stalks awkward beside
the filmy petals.
I wondered if they come
with the mulch each year,
those willful weeds
that thrive on disdain.
I thought about how
I’d get the old
Sears Hardware bucket,
gloves and kneeling pad,
find a spot
among them, and begin
to gently pull, my hand
low on the stem
to get the root and all.
I thought about placing
each weed into the pail,
filling it up to the top,
the summer blooms spared,
and then, how good I’d feel
when it was done.

Previously published in Waccamaw.

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Grace Curtis’s chapbook, The Surly Bonds of Earth, was the 2010 winner of the Lettre Sauvage poetry chapbook  contest. She has had poems in Scythe Literary Journal, The Chaffin Journal, Waccamaw Literary Journal, Red River Review, among others. She received her MFA from Ashland University in 2010 and she writes about poetry at www.N2Poetry.com. Grace’s “Written on the Backs of Speedway Gas Receipts” is also in Reprint.

Object(s) to bring back to life: “I would bring the clothesline back into my life as it was when I was a child. My husband has always argued against it because he doesn’t want his underwear hanging out for others to see and he says clothes dried on a line are not as soft as dryer-dried clothes, which is true; but, using a clothesline is one way to use less energy. There are other reasons too. First, line-dried laundry smells like a lovely summer breeze. Second, hanging wet clothes one at a time onto the clothesline feels like it might be a kind of Zen meditation. Of course I am romanticizing a quotidian task I would surely come to loathe. I am reminded of Richard Wilbur’s poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”, that uses laundry hanging on a line as its central metaphor.”