Disposable
Mark Allen Jenkins There is a special plot in hell for throwing away plants, I think to myself, as I throw last season’s down the long, metal garbage throat. It’s easy to believe a garden center is about nurturing life, raising plants from seeds and grafts. Out of a dozen green leaves, each stem also has a few brown blades, or like blackberry, blue berry plants, hibernate as a stick in a plastic pail full of dirt. It doesn’t matter – rack after rack of this year’s plants, just came off a nursery truck. On galvanized tables, I unwrap sago palms, generic in their green fronds, like the boston ferns inside, in their own tangle of tiny fiddleheads that hang on metal poles. An hour before closing, I find discarded seed packets I don’t have time to sort and return to flimsy cardboard spring-loaded racks because I'm on my way with more plants, lined up on flat carts like planes waiting for takeoff. I will catapult them down the grey slide where a hydraulic ram will press them against broken bags of gravel, dirt, and patio stone, ruins of a civilization that only exists in Better Homes and Gardens. |
About the author:
Mark Allen Jenkins is a PhD student in Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas where he serves as Editor-in-Chief for Reunion: The Dallas Review. His poetry has appeared in Memorious, minnesota review, South Dakota Review, and is forthcoming in Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio. |