GRACE H. ZHOU
Ars Botanica
Grow back to the scent of osmanthus & champaca,
hillsides awash in the wild mustard’s yellow,
peaches the size of my child-heart
& cucumbers colored in early morning light.
Grow back to the mango, the loquat,
hedges of ginger & ti, the reptilian gleam
of avocado-studded trees. Guava berries
on a knoll we called Guava Mountain,
& Job’s tears strung in bracelets
from a roadside verge, our Green Grassland.
Grow back to every patch of earth
that bursts in verdure,
every highway underpass, balcony, or open lot
that becomes a wayside flourish.
When they say go back to —
I will tell them
I come from a many-seeded land, land
of the careful eye & tender palm.
Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Frontier Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Longleaf Review, AAWW’s The Margins, Kweli, and The Hellebore. She holds a PhD from Stanford University and is a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the Ohio State University. She is an alumna of Tin House Workshops and Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, and a reader at Tinderbox Poetry.