Poem | Vegetables | Commonweal Magazine

(Dan Smedley/Unsplash)

Picking
crookneck squash
I am sure

no mistake
is beyond me.
I am making

history in the green
exacting plenitude
of sphagnum and Voltaire.

I pick things up
that walk slowly.
Box

turtle, ironwood
beetle sunning
on granite.

No touching
the cabbage butter-
fly, clearly no touching

its blind white geometry
in a field
dense with cucumber leaves.

Theodore Worozbyt is the author of The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006), winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize; Letters of Transit, winner of the 2007 Juniper Prize and published by UMass Press; and Smaller Than Death, winner of the 2015 Knut House Press Award. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Po&sie, and the Southern Review.