my sister tells my father after he bends
to pluck from her patch
of pennyroyal, age-old abortifacient from mint’s
family, square-stemmed, toxic, crested
like a tropical bird with morning-purple
tuft, and he straightens, says, You giving away abortions now?
Later, she writes me, I think he understood.
And yet I cannot say what
unholy act, what cruel law or deed does not endeavor
to protect something. Not so very long ago,
my sister could have
hanged as a witch for her wilderness gardens
of nettle and hyssop, of yarrow and calendula,
her care for forbidden bodies and
snaring of bee swarms from pine branches.
Come spring, she’ll find in the wet death-refreshed
loam spent shotgun shells planted
among saved seed of belladonna, mugwort, blue cohosh,
Queen Anne’s lace — named, so the lore goes,
for the old queen’s contest
to see who could knit a stitched bloom most like
the flower’s fractal tooth-white face, though
she pricked her finger as she purled,
loosed a single drop dark onto her own lace’s clean new eye.
