Olive planted her words hoping they would sprout green shoots skyward, drive gnarly roots deep within the brown-hued earth. She waited with child-like anxiousness to see what fruit they’d bear. But her seedlings never took root. Rereading the instructions from the plant-a-poem kit, she missed the part where it said poems are not perennials. They cannot flower, fall dormant, and flower again. They are neither evergreen nor deciduous. She felt betrayed by plant-a-poem’s shifty marketers. When she went to dig them up with a shovel, there was no trace of her words. I knew it, she murmured. Absolutely magical.
