Poem: Jobs for the Weekend

    The work of the garden is never merely human work. The animals, insects and plants join in labor with the gardener, sometimes in harmony with human plans, but just as often thwarting or diverting them. This is one way a garden becomes a paradox: Its purported peace is the total effect of the garden’s frenetic, multispecies, conflict-rich choreography. Oki Sogumi’s “Jobs for the Weekend” captures not some placid, ideal garden, but a real one — edgy, animate and bustling. Selected by Anne Boyer

    Credit…Illustration by R. O. Blechman

    Jobs for the Weekend

    By Oki Sogumi

    Nymph, the curly garlic clove
    Boating in the bean pot
    The drumming of plums and striped
    Beetle’s disease or jumping worm
    Pepper plants can branch horizontal
    But arrows always down
    In the domestic garden I still have a job
    And the catbird yells but follows me
    For 200 days I’ve summoned this
    Language, the meow of the frenemy
    Sleaving the gray
    Particle from light


    Anne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for general nonfiction. Oki Sogumi is a writer and K-Drama fan who lives in Philadelphia, where she gardens for moths. Her book “Poems (2012-17)” was published by Face Press (U.K.).

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