Robin Rosen Chang

Raised Beds

The summer of virus and loneliness,

I’d walk around the raised bed

crammed with basil, dill, and cilantro,

at least three times,

a gesture that felt almost prayerlike,

though I didn’t believe in prayer.

But wherever I looked,

someone seemed to be bowing

or genuflecting:

a man scratching his dog’s round belly,

my neighbor, knees in the dirt,

yanking weeds, the squirrel,

its small hands touching.

Under the azalea bush,

a stained statue: the kneeling angel—

that spring, my brother,

an early case, collapsed,

then lay for thirteen days in a hospital.

I circled and circled and circled

the raised bed. The romaine lettuce—

its outer leaves heavy,

bending toward the earth.

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021), and is a 2023 New Jersey Council on the Arts poetry fellow. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Plume, The Journal, among others, and have been featured on Verse Daily. She was an honorable mention for the Spoon River Review’s 2019 Editor’s Prize and the winner of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poet’s Choice Award. She is the co-founder and co-director of The Fields Poetry Reading Series.