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.