Over the summer while processing and participating in the Black Lives Matter protests and the police and Tr*mp-ian reactions to them, I found in my backyard a vine that had so deeply rooted itself that it had split into several different vines, each the thickness of a baseball bat.
These vines overtook trees that were thriving and had already killed multiple branches off by the time I had realized what was happening. The vine made me consider how things like prejudice and racism invisibly grown in the background of policies rooted in evil and eventually become the institutions themselves.
——
Invasive Species
The genius of the vine
is patience.
Like colonialism,
or the police,
vines pillage silently
then violently.
Invisibly arriving,
sprouting shoots
tracing the earth,
and anchoring
tendrils to trunks.
What might have begun
as a neighborly invitation to dinner
becomes a plundering.
The vine equivalent
of a one-night-stand
that “forgot” to pull out.
Over months
the guest,
overtakes its host
with order and intention.
Mingling
in cedar canopies,
borrowing your car
and returning on E,
leaving you with a pregnancy
you're unable to terminate.
Those same vines that
once elevated
your pretentious trellis,
giving you security and pomp,
are now shaking down
once vibrant organisms,
kneeling on carotids
whispering
“stop talking,
stop yelling,
it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen
to talk.”