In this poem by Lauren Hilger, the cultivated landscapes of modern living—backyards that abut and repeat one another—seem to fold in on the speaker, even as her humor and language work to keep them aloof. Looking onto this greenery, even the plainest words can fall into managing expectation and possibility, how the speaker’s life compares with real and imaginary neighbors. Her uneasiness at those prospects is revealed in the poem’s revising syntax, its nested and shifting tenses, its need to repeat words and experiences in order to displace or redefine them. The wind or breeze that moves throughout the poem gives sensible form to this play of experience and expectation, providing its speaker with a shifting anchor. Wrapped in sheets, in sounds, in wind, the speaker imagines a loneliness that can look like both freedom and responsibility, deflating her more tangible self in order to observe the lyrical possibilities that move through it. –The Editors and the Poetry Staff
Greenery
Outside,
the neighbor’s pinned sheet moves
like a human on the other side of the fence.
Outside my life, I kept saying, to make up for the
shame of doing it wrong. My life, not how it will be,
every wrap around me someone’s, to be inside, more.
Outside no sound but the wind I love, sun on my bare foot.
Waiting for everyone to wake up. Here we are, changed, it’s
the summer we wanted. A look we planned. We ordered burgers,
and after a question I screamed my laugh you can’t take anywhere.
Outside all that is here to hurt us. Outside letting. How can I thank you?
I carried the art over a floor of vents that shot up my dress, blew my hair.
I had expected it. I once asked my parents for a part of my yard. I asked
and if a leaf blew up it meant yes, sideways no. I played in the field a game
by myself. I had to take care of the corn stalks, pigs, myself, that I had no one, that was the game.