Cyn Kitchen




Hear me out—last year I buried

a row of slips in a soft furrow

of earth, then gently mounded

a sift of black soil over

each hard knot & waited. Rain came

from the spigot of sky

or the tears of my bucket,

gully washers, toad-floaters

we called them, rendering

my garden a soup-muck of mud

power to suck off your boots.

I waited & when that was done

waited more until a timid shoot

of vine broke into the light.

I buried it again, up to its neck

piling a skirt of dirt beneath,

conducting a mysterious

dance of molecules bringing

order from chaos. All summer,

bury, water, reach & bury. At last

exhausted from my relentless

assaults, the fight in the vine

surrendered, withered & dried.

This is not the end. Scoop away

the weight of the grave & what do

you find, there all along

humming a hammer tune

a sound like doors slamming shut

and flinging wide again.





Cyn is professor and chair of English at Knox College where she teaches creative writing and literature. She is the author of Ten Tongues, a collection of short stories. She also writes essays and poems some of which appear or are forthcoming from Laurel Review, American Writers Review, Poetry Quarterly, Poetry South and Cutleaf. Cyn lives in the heart of Forgottonia, a downstate region on the Illinois prairie, where she tends to her gardens and a menagerie of animals.