Spring Tonic

Every year there’s watercress in the runoff

ditch, froth of foam-bloom in the culvert that drains 

a highway, a parking lot, a construction 

site, a few gratuitous cow 

fields: meaning there’s not enough iodine

in the world, that cress will never be safe

to eat. So with field-mustard creasies

not up yet, you turn for your equinox green

back to muddy yards, cracks in foundations

of buildings, hairy bittercress:  

its tiny pepper-spice, blunt scallop-curl 

leaves, satyr-labor to spread its glitter 

of cruciform flowers over gardens, waste 

places, intramural fields, detonating slender 

siliques in a micro-ballista sputter 

of seed.  Chopped into salad, sipped

over soup, gnawed in the raw, it’s what you need 

now:  deep vivid bite of what 

comes first, blazes its way, makes 

cold rain-slits into its own 

flesh, takes the first and only chance 

it has. Spring tonic that wrings 

mouth and bowels because still fresh

from the dark cauldron’s boil and spit; 

taste of renewal strong enough, in its spiral 

basal-rosette heart, for this very world:  

its sudsy ditches, greasy roads, whirling weed-

eaters, grinding clocks, night sticks raised 

to strike. Taste of resistance photo-

synthesized into unfettered 

exuberance.  Attar of bitter.  

Catherine Carter’s poetry collections include Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, The Memory of Gills, and Marks of the Witch. Read more.


“Spring Tonic” was first published in Women Speak, Volume 7, 2021, Sheila-na-Gig Publications.

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