By Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice
Oh, you tiny yellow goldies, fruit of toothy-edged leaves and bell-shaped flowers, your shrub toxic in every other way. You grow in ditches, woods, old pastures.
You staunch volunteer, provider of snacks for kids who help with the hoeing. Ground cherries, sweet-tart not-gooseberries, aftertaste of tomato, nightshade sibling to eggplant, potatoes, tobacco, all solanine—alkaloid—bearers.
I offered your seedlings, once, to a student, who stood at my window where a tray of cups from the school’s garden sat in the sun. He never smiled—or it seemed he didn’t, we were masked—but he looked straight at me, behind my desk, what are these? I offered him your struggling sprouts. He didn’t forget to pick you up later, brown hair in his eyes as he kept the tray steady.
Husk cherries, paper yellow lanterns, falling soft when ripe to the soil, heaps of dried sepals broken open and left by children, mouths sweetened, gone deeper into the green.
in memory of F. (2004-2024)
Jennifer Hyde Dracos-Tice (she/her) has poems published in SWWIM Every Day, Witness, Psaltery & Lyre, Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Whale Road Review, Still: The Journal (2016 Judge’s Choice Award), NCTE English Journal, and elsewhere. Her first full-length poetry collection, Lodged in The Belly, and her first chapbook, Roar of All Septembers, are forthcoming from Main Street Rag. A long-time high school English teacher with literature degrees from Brown and Indiana-Bloomington, she lives in Florida with her wife.
