All posts tagged: jennifer perrine

In the Garden of Invasive Species, I Offer Gratitude

By JENNIFER PERRINE

Girl in a garden

 

Port Murray, New Jersey and Milwaukie, Oregon

for my grandparents, who did not teach me
how to farm, and yet they scattered these seeds:
How a dunk into scalding water slips
the skin from a peach, leaves it unfuzzed, slick
for canning. How the trick to shucking corn
is one clean jerk. How jars of beet brine turn
eggs to amethysts that stain my fingers,
my lips. They left me to play in cellars
stocked with preserves and jam, in rows of trees
that released chestnut burrs for my bare feet
to find. What would they think of my pea shoots
left unlatticed, free to tendril one noose
after another around other plants,
my slapdash harvest, larder left to chance?

In the Garden of Invasive Species, I Offer Gratitude
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Dive

By JENNIFER PERRINE

Central Pennsylvania

Every Friday and Saturday night, 
and sometimes Thursdays, too, we would drive 
the highway out from the college town, 

past farmland, turn down that road that led
deep into the forest. In the dark, 
we parked and followed the unlit path,

Dive
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