SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Partridge Boswell
Woodstock, Vermont
Partridge Boswell is the author of
Some Far Country (Grolier Poetry Prize). His poems and essays have recently surfaced in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Salmagundi, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, december, Plume, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner and The Moth. Co-founder of Bookstock Literary Festival, he troubadours widely with the poetry/music group Los Lorcas, whose debut release Last Night in America (2021) is available on Thunder Ridge Records
Ode to Invasive Species
You’ll need a cement jaw, gloves of thick raw-
hide and bombproof canvas pants, a sharp spade
maybe a pick to pry soil loose around the base,
a mild day after a night of rain to soften their
resolve, an intolerant epithet or two to remind
them who owns the sun and rain, the nutrient-
rich loam here merely on loan. Loppers alone
won’t do. You’ll need to grab low, yank and
wrench maybe even dig before roots unscrew
their tapered lengths from rhizomatic depths
lukewarm & dark as the womb of a surrogate
who consents to birth but not to motherhood.
You’ll need a uniformed conservation corps
of eager unformed youth who won’t connect
the green sweat of just another summer job
with an angry mob’s generic objective, who
will hear in their names only the thorn in buck-
thorn, the strife in loosestrife, the knot in knot-
weed, the suck in honeysuckle, the Russian
in Russian olive, the false in false indigo, the
heave in tree of heaven. Access to a 24/7 news
channel might help, but since your genocide’s
low tech, all you’ll really need is the hook of
a melody’s veiled invective, catchy as Sweet
Home Alabama where kudzu runs more rampant
than whatever genus crooned the land back to
sleep after the Centennial Exposition where
the miraculous new plant from Japan was first
introduced along with the telephone and type-
writer and their unborn progeny of devices
that are now more endemic than air.