Jess brings all the plants into the bathroom. Countertops glow neon jade,
the tub sprouts palm fingers, fiddlehead fig. Waxy verdant cloister
in the sink, emerald dog tongues tonguing porcelain. There’s so much life
to tend to. Jess turns each measuring cup’s silver ear into the brown world
beneath it, the water listening for where it needs to spread among the roots,
the soil offering a welcome. They know each variety’s preference—
some take water from the tap, some bronze at touch of chlorine—so they
patiently filter batches and distribute, pot by pot. When I crack the bathroom
door in the middle of the day, I walk into a glasshouse. Room humming green,
vines corkscrew across the windowsill, faces bright with chlorophyll and drying
in the sunlight. I can hear their drip and sigh. After bathing. After being fed.
We’re trying to discern whether we want to become parents.
A thing you have to work for. Money spent, biology precision-tinkered
in a lab. We take turns lifting the question with our hands, passing
the question between us like it’s already our child; you hold her now,
this fleshy question mark, you pat her on the rump, you wash her hair.
You walk her through the rain. It’s hard to feel like we’re enough, our bodies
settling earthbound into thirty-six. We thirty-six our way through
the supermarket, trying to cut back on sugar. We thirty-six our bed,
sleeping in a limb-knot with the dog. Our knees thirty-six us on our runs
through the neighborhood. Chasing nothing. A teacher of mine
sends a message: I’m looking forward to failure. We thirty-six
the conversation after dinner, me perched on the kitchen counter,
Jess pressed into a stool, the rubber tree ten feet tall reaching raw hands
around the night, around our biggest questions. We’re surrounded
by what greens us. We nourish veined and growing things. The future
a metallic ear tilted toward the potting soil of our hummed and sighing lives.
