Defiance

Published Monday, November 3, 2025

---

Soldiers on both sides of the Western Front lived

in trenches long enough to plant seeds.
Some placed white stones around plots.

On the playing fields of Skra, a stadium in Warsaw,
athletes were replaced by ghetto gardens
which became mass graves.

In Manzanar, California, orchards
of Japanese American prisoners survived
the whims of guards.

In Tikrit, Iraq, the 141st Engineer Combat
Battalion planted sunflower seeds
from their mothers.

Our first garden was in Brighton, Massachusetts.
We lived on the second floor. This was back when
we were renters and before we knew

that all of us always are. Payment went
to a woman downstairs who had many famous lives.
Mythomania, it’s called,

her own kind of war garden.
Her husband yelled a lot and her baby never stopped
crying. When we asked permission

to plant bulbs in the front yard, she whispered
yes, then watched us from behind
lace curtains. Oppressed

by her endless lives and her husband’s endless war
on her fecund mind, we moved.
Plus, I was pregnant.

Next spring, hoping to find her standing
in flowers, we drove slowly past a Lincoln Continental
parked on fresh blacktop.

Sometimes I wonder what lives we still live
inside her.

---

The Iowa Review, Vol 54, issue 1.

(Thank you to Kenneth Helphand’s book, Defiant Gardens, for inspiration)