Two Poems by Carla Barger

Grown Wild

Row after row mother toiled
pulling bright swollen beans from the vines,
a daughter bent-backed, brow beading,
while Grandma sat on the porch and cried. 

The garden had grown wild in secret
though mother had phoned every day.
Grandma had gasped, always winded,
exasperated at the need to explain.

I’m minding the corn, snapping beans,
boiling down blueberries for jam.
The frost will come early–—so early!—
and I still have so much to can.

But a neighbor explained to mother
how he’d see Grandma at night dirty, afraid,
ghostlike in flashes of heat lightning,
and wandering the rows every day,

whispering like droplets to onions,
laughing with crickets and peas.
While the corn matured and grew heavy
and the peppers grew tangled with weeds

Grandma frantically twirled in the moonlight,
a wild thunderstorm on its way out to sea.

 ghost

 /ˈgōst/
noun

 1 :  a disembodied soul: Just days before the stroke, Grandma dreams that she is standing at the edge of a field of wildflowers across which a stranger beckons. She hesitates, touches toes to petals, then refuses, unable to crush beauty into dirt.

 2 : a faint shadowy trace: The powdery scales of a marsh moth smacked against the cool glass of the hospital window. From underneath the thin blanket grandma’s hands float free, pinch at the air around her that is swarming with the unseen world. The dream fills the room for those who did not dream it, the stranger’s unuttered voice louder than our own.

 3 : a false image in a photographic negative: Coffee tins full of them in her dresser drawer— here she is with Great Aunt Dovey, here with Uncle Joe. We finger the brittle strips gingerly as if they too might turn to dust, holding each one up to the window until the light reveals her alone— someone’s hand on her shoulder, the puff-sleeve of her blouse crushed, the pattern of petals nothing but a series of dark dots.

Behind her a blanched field of wildflowers in monochromatic bloom.

Carla Barger is a poet and lyric essayist who hails from the farmlands of Southern Ohio. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently finishing her PhD in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she also teaches poetry and co-directs the Digital Humanities Initiative. Her work has appeared in decomP magazinE, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Light Ekphrastic, MidAmerica, and elsewhere. She received the 2019 David Diamond Writing Prize from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Malcolm Sedam Writing Award for Poetry from Miami University, and has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project Award. Find out more about Carla at CarlaBarger.com.