By: Julia DaSilva
1. Lavender-cotton:
(unrelated to either, but for
the grey-green leaves)
yellow flowers, for contrast, useless
for weaving and though evergreen,
tending not to live long, being
as it is,
ground cover;
2. Cast-me-down:
not ground cover, despite the name—
a popular corruption
of another name for an herb
trying to hold up too many meanings,
too many dried petals baked into bread
(yes, lavender)
3. Stickadove:
cast-me-down, perennial;
once cultivated as medicine until
its spiked flowers left scratches on
birds who want only to be left
in peace (why
do they join you in your garden?)
4. Butter-root:
lavender giving in to imposed fears
the perfect carnivorous flower, as though growing to serve
a voyeur’s fantasy,
often violet (sometimes moon-blanched),
suffused with a mismatched
assortment of yellow, green, red
like the ill-fitting sweaters that announce
this root (quote) “obsolete”
(the name?
the wilting in what can only be your
carnivorous tendencies,
carnivorous desires?
the ill-matched flowers
themselves?)
5. Prattling parnel,
whose names babble like masses of
pink rosettes in the
unfavourable cracks between categorical warehouses,
loose woman-priest’s mistress-effeminate:
London pride (for shady conditions)
St. Patrick’s cabbage (for feeding the ground
cover that turned fae
into snakes)
whimsy (for its refusal)
“look up and kiss me” (look down
and kiss me)
6. Man’s blood:
a thistle, for which
you might cast about in vague anger;
7. Scorpion grass:
another name for forget-me-not,
which is another name for
the pale purple herb (for which you need other names)
morphed from soft sweetheart trinkets to
stinging fields of
might-have-been;
8. Sicklewort:
that self-heals its scarlet wounds,
harvests the lessons and moves on,
to new forget-me-not cast-me-down springs;
9. The will-of-the-wisp
that the soil growing honest plants in
daylight exhales into the night,
when romantic realism
(a slip, perhaps, for
semantic realism)
can no longer be held in—
waiting for those ready
to be led astray.
It’s not a plant, unlike
10. Nepenthe:
also an herb, an imagined
remedy for sorrow—
as much lavender
as any other fiction
or evaporating ghost.
Julia DaSilva’s poetry has appeared in Eclectica, Rat’s Ass Review, Lychee Rind Zine, the Toronto-based Young Voices magazine, the University of Toronto journals The Spectatorial, The Strand, and Hardwire, as well as an upcoming issue of Storm of Blue Press Magazine. She is a guest in Tkaronto/Toronto on Dish With One Spoon territory, and writes fantasy as well as poetry, with a novel and a collection of short stories in progress and a particular interest in the politics of magic systems. Her writing is heavily informed by her work in climate justice organizing, and explores questions of political responsibility and queerness, embodiment, love and hope in worlds coming apart and being rebuilt.