Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer
Nandina
A long time ago,
you always knew exactly where to find me
(in the nandina, hiding
heavenly bamboo
back pressed against brick by the
tornado door)
Do you know that I can still
essentially
touch
the red berries, stiff skins
mealy white meat waxy
on my fingers, the slick yellow seed
although
I cannot picture the flowers?
Now we both know better
you, for your love of the cedar waxwings
and me, for my increasing
inability to hide.
Thick yellow pollen
is falling, somewhere,
from the pines
like all I ever wanted
needles swaying out of time.
The nandina flowers, of course
I remember, now
are white
inflorescences
like mine
imperfect flowers
only so because, perhaps
I dearly want and wanted to remain
your sister.
I am kept to you enough
for showy bracts, persimmons
purple dead nettle in the palm
all the trappings of sisterhood
the brick wall
my back pressed against the words
we scratched into each other
through the thicket
tethering me
you moving like a storm
or fen
or swallow
through the trappings
of threadbare and lovely growing
everything
I could be
Niche Partitioning
Every
evening
primrose was already
meticulously emptied
desiccated corrugated capsules
dissected for oilseeds.
If I knew how to make room for you
it was a long time ago
and it’s grown in thick now
with burdock and dead goldenrod
with snow that won’t melt perhaps for your forever.
If you were lucky
you would have been brave enough to leave.
Instead your migratory restlessness only
rustled like a hollow coneflower
its taproot long asleep but still
somewhere digging
deep
begging
the sky to turn.
Up in the dark jet stream, I have heard
spores and spiders circumvent the ground
whirling
eternal.
But not you. Not me.
Here the cold is evening
into heavy winter. In the dark
I dream about
soft
oilseeds.
I want only one moment
a quick goodbye
just one place between the hemlock needles and the tree.
A little hollow
just one of the tiny spaces
they have made for us
but I can’t break my way
through the branches.
Please
I want to grieve.
There isn’t any help here
but at least you can live a long life
in the place where you asked once
the long waiting
holding on.
You should linger
carving out a lifetime of trying that hangs in the silent
cold air
quiet enough only to keep
pacing a holding pattern between sleep and flight
and I can pretend some
cryogenic
future
big enough for the both of us
Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer
Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer is an emerging trans poet and recent graduate of Marlboro College currently living in southern Vermont. (S)he writes poetry addressing shape, family, and grief, informed by a background in ecology and plant taxonomy. Thomas spends leisure time cooking, reclining, and woefully neglecting a garden.