Trees Will Grow Your Hands

Once you leave, the path will be swallowed by your ghost. Trees will grow many streets. And your wild cactus hands. Yes. If you cut down a tree, its roots grow stranger. Haunted, they say, but no one has looked. Everyone turns on their siren lights at dusk. It tells the ground to stop sifting for feet. Some remedies cannot be swept. Others require torches. And one sparked hummingbird. Once you leave, ash.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

                                        nailing out a missing tear
                    will you?     taste and bitter
 
                                                    and put a whetstone on it
                                                                heard it heals uneven straights in the heart
                              the rolling
and she’ll take care of it
                    find the honey in the rock
                                                                rack for the clothespins
                                                      spin now, spin now                     that throat
                                                                                                 into red
                                that hem         in the prayer of the river
                                                                              burning
 
                                                                 go down, sister,           go weed

 
 
 

Amy Jo Trier-Walker is a tree and herb farmer in Indiana and the author of Trembling Ourselves into Trees (Horse Less Press 2015). Recent work can also be found in Forklift, Ohio, Handsome, Ghost Ocean, Word For/Word, and inter|rupture, among others, and she is the Poetry and Art Editor at Black Tongue Review.