Gillian Cummings

My two poems in this issue came about as a result of moving from one place to another. For close to twenty-seven years, I had lived in an apartment on the outskirts of White Plains, New York. The neighborhood was fairly urban and didn’t afford much in the way of opportunities to garden, although there were and are beautiful parks in Westchester County, and I would walk in them frequently. Walking in the parks was a haven, and I even had a favorite tree, a hollowed-out sycamore I would stand inside.

In 2022, I moved north to Catskill, a small town in a more rural county of the Hudson Valley. For the first time since my childhood, I had a piece of property where I could grow things. Everyone had said I would love gardening, but I soon found out something different about myself. It wasn’t the rose bushes I planted, the rows of daffodils, or the bed of sweet peas that I loved. It was the so-called weeds, the plants that were supposedly unwanted, the ones that other people told me should be pulled up. When the milkweed appeared, and the pokeweed, even the porcelain berry vine (that isn’t in these poems), I wanted them to stay, even if they interfered with the flowers that were deemed prettier. And when the man who cuts my lawn one day decided to do me a favor and pull them all up, I was heartbroken. That was when I wrote the poem “The Dead Things.”

Since then, I have told the man who cuts the lawn to please let these plants remain. I want them here. They remind me of the wilderness-feeling I found in some of those parks I used to walk in when I lived in Westchester. And I think that going forward I will try to grow some of the other plants I used to see on my walks, like thistle, like fleabanes, like asters, goldenrod.