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      August 28, 2020Alison LutermanPulling Weeds

      I have not dug up the root.
      I’ve sweated, I’ve thinned
      ornamental grasses high as my waist;
      clipped waving fronds of night-blooming jasmine
      that lunged through the fence like girls at a rock concert,
      borne the smears of their sticky lust all over my shirt.
      I’ve hacked crowded purple sage
      back to its rightful place; snapped at dry sticks,
      yanked prickly leaves and stems,
      but I know, in the darkest,
      smallest place inside,
      that I have not gotten to the root.
      Not eradicated,
      merely cut back, periodically,
      the relentless ego, the chattering need
      for attention
      so a few roses might flourish
      here and there: my better angels.
      But there’s the root: call it vanity, call it excess
      of thinking, call it personality:
      the incorrigible, prickly, human root.
      Look at that castor bean tree, beautiful,
      poisonous, which someone planted years ago,
      in a fit of reckless aesthetics,
      its Martian pink rubber ball spikes
      covering the toxic black seed.
      That’s me, too.
      And no matter how close to the ground I raze it,
      it grows back, like a haunted thicket.
      And I know: even my best qualities (a certain
      openness, a generosity of heart),
      go rank when allowed to squander themselves.
      And I know I am the witch in this story,
      as well as the prince, hacking his way through brambles
      in hopes of reaching Love, that sleeping maiden,
      even as I am also the noxious weeds, the protective barrier …
      Is it the better part of prudence then
      that keeps me from ruining
      my back tugging up something hell-bent on staying
      stuck in the earth where it was first planted?
      Or just plain cussedness?
      Or could this whole fairytale be a ruse
      behind which the face of my true self is hiding?

      from #68 - Summer 2020

      Alison Luterman

      “I write poems and plays and songs, teach, pet my cat, fret about the state of our country and the state of our world, and live in Oakland, California.”