Come to a gradual acceptance
that your tomatoes will disappear,
ripening one day, stalk stripped naked next,
there is no sense relevant to a garden.
Welcome your daily failure to observe
most of the writhing, insect, water,
root, beneath the shallow bed
of cedar mulch. Every morning,
you will kill a lime green caterpillar
and every morning it will return
to bring your world to ruin.
Your rectangle attention is
to blame. Wanting points
of reference. Between favorable
and catastrophic, work proceeds.
Soil neutral to slightly alkaline.
Where is everything going?
You will no longer wonder.
A stranger at the office gives you
seven exaggerated lemons.
You begin to wonder again.
Months pass, rain precedes the day
you give up hope for good,
mourn only the effort, grief
macerated by a new, more reliable
subtraction. My advice is this:
expect to learn nothing from error.
There is only trial, which must
be tolerated, heard, like thirst.

Cameron Quan Louie is from Tucson, Arizona. His chapbook, Apology Engine, selected by Trace Peterson for the Gold Line Press Chapbook Competition, is forthcoming in 2022. Cameron’s poems, nonfiction, and erasures have recently appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rumpus, Pacifica Literary Review, the 2020 Best New Poets Anthology, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the University of Washington. You can find him at cameronqlouie.com and @elemenoq.

Matt Bristol (Of the Earth IV, black and white negative) is a master’s candidate in the Food Systems Program at the University of Vermont. He recently self-published two narrative photographic essays while teaching in Colorado. He likes to hide his work in free libraries and bookstores.

This poem was originally published in Salt Hill 45.