Wild Greens

The annual June “Open Call: The Garden Issue” issue takes us back to our roots. We call the open call issue The Garden Issue because you all are planting a seed of creativity and watching it grow. Wild Greens is where we grow our creative selves.

“Everything grows in your garden” a poem by Doug Jacquier speaks to new beginnings. Three songbirds follow. In Sarah Jane Timmons’s “interrupt the morning” in acrylic and gouache, the artist has painted a robin on a piece of bark that had fallen from a tree in her garden. In Jo Gatenby’s short story “Songbird,” an injured husband captures a songbird, selfishly hoping to keep the beauty of the song to himself. “Screaming Baby Starling Season,” by Lynne Marie Rosenberg in colored pencil, considers the cycle of life.  

“Meet Me,” a poem by Katie Moino, explores the connection between landscape and magic, inner and outer selves, the quiet connections that nature can bring. The song “October Sky,” written and performed by Pat Severin, connects memory and romance to the month of October. Angela Patera’s “Vibrant Forest Scene,” in acrylics on mixed media paper, experiments with soft colors and blended shapes to capture the feeling of the forest. “As the Sun Appears at Noon,” a poem by Ion Corcos, uses natural imagery to suggest a transition to something new.

Maggie Topel’s digital logo for the issue draws inspiration from local farm stands that dot the sides of roads, and sweet tasty things you can forage.

“The Divine,” a collage by Holly Genovese, finds aesthetic and political connections across working class art and queer art created in Mid-Atlantic cities, affirming the vibrancy and importance of urban art. In “To the Italian Wall Lizard I Rescued” by Sara Letourneau, the persona recounts a time when they saved a life. “FISH” in acrylic by Judith R. Robinson, in bright yellow, red, and blue, celebrates the beauty of creatures.

The pieces at the end of the issue are all about experimentation, creativity and freedom in one way or another. In “My Garden Grows Here,” a grieving poem by Rebecca Agauas, the persona imagines what her mother would do if she ever lost her daughter.  “Funky Cacti Times” by Melissa Lomax combines multiple elements, including hand drawing, Photoshop, digital color, and black construction paper. “The Art of Controversy,” by Elaine Joy Edaya Degale embraces the freedom to go against a conventional, conservative, white view on what a black woman “should” or “shouldn’t” be. “Bloom” in acrylic by Lisa Dailey depicts a bouquet made from a variety of experimental techniques and unconventional applications: plastic bags, celery stalks, and Q-tips were all used to paint.

Grow free, grow together, grow your own way, grow wild.

Rebecca

Everything grows in your garden

The touch of your hand is everywhere,

covering all of the ground,

nurturing the native,

gathering in the orphan,

weeding out the wrong,

feeding the strugglers,

watering the thirsty,

tough-loving the growth,

leaving space,

weaving magic,

sewing hope,

visioning dreams,

creating legacy,

building the earth,

and loving ‘the lost’.

Songbird 

by Jo Gatenby

The church bells chimed their morning greeting as the songbird flew above the small town, unwittingly following Main Street, over the diner, the building where Woolworths had opened with great celebration in 1954, closed in quiet desperation in 1997, and now housed a dusty antiques co-op, then the barbershop and movie theatre, before veering right on Neil Armstrong Lane, to soar past the turnoff to the highway, keeping straight as the road changed from hardtop to much-patched asphalt, dwindling to a rutted drive, entering a wooded copse. The sun beat warm on her head as she headed for her favorite branch at the top of the highest tree, overlooking the best garden in the world.

Because it was hers.

She lifted her head and began to sing a song of praise to the garden’s beauty. She sang of the sun slipping through the leaves in the morning, sparking the dew on the grass until it glittered like scattered jewels…of the first buds of spring, the warm air caressing her body, the joy of finding a mate, hatching eggs, raising young.

Her song was a celebration of life.

***

At the end of the garden stood a timeworn stone house, so covered with moss and vines, it might have grown there.

Every morning, a bitter man trapped in a high-backed chair was wheeled outside, in hopes that the fresh air would help heal him. Weeks had passed since he last smiled. All the joy he’d ever known was dust and distant memory.

He pushed his wife and friends away with cruel words and angry taunts, infuriated when they excused his bad behavior, citing his injuries with pity in their voices. He wallowed in his rage and loneliness, with all the satisfaction of a hog in a mud hole.

The man listened to the bird’s song. He didn’t understand the meaning. But for the first time in months, a hint of pleasure stirred inside him.

He decided he needed her music to stop his pain.

The next morning, he set out birdseed. When the bird accepted his treat as her due, he began moving it a bit closer every day. And so, he gained her trust.

She flew down, perched on his finger, and sang for him. But it was not enough.

Soon after, he added a golden cage beside his chair. At first, this apparition made her nervous. But she trusted him, and when her treats were moved inside, she innocently hopped in to enjoy them.

The man closed the door behind her.

When the songbird realized she was trapped, she panicked. Her wings flailed, beating a frantic rhythm as she threw herself against the unyielding bars. Her shrill, discordant cries filled the air with jagged notes of fear and fury.

Still, he was resolved to have her music for himself. He had her carried into the house. “Sing for me, little bird,” he coaxed.

But she perched in silence, hunkered down, her head pulled into her shoulders. She refused to eat or drink. Her feathers began to molt.

The man was unsettled by her distress, yet determined to coax her song back to life again.

He had the cage moved beside the window, hoping the sight of the garden would cheer the songbird up.

She stared longingly through the glass. And then she did begin to sing.

The bird sang of lost freedom, of the pain of being confined, of dreams fading in the dark. This time, the man understood her, since he’d experienced those same things.

Her song held such yearning and sorrow that tears rose in his eyes. Unable to bear it, he took the cage into the garden, where he opened the door and set her free.

The songbird stared, trembling, then leapt to the edge of the doorway. She hesitated, then burst into the air and flew up to her favorite perch, high in the tallest tree.

The man watched her go, a sad smile twisting his lips.

She began to sing a song of such happiness that tears once again sprang to his eyes. It was a hymn of release, rebirth, of the joy of living, of being.

There was a flash of color, and her mate landed next to her, his warble adding a counterpoint to the beauty of her melody, blending to create a story of love and support that floated gently through the garden, like sunlight through leaves.

The man felt a soft touch on his shoulder and realized that this message too resonated within him. He reached up and covered his wife’s hand with his own. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

And the songbird sang for them both.

Meet Me

As the Sun Appears at Noon 

To the Italian Wall Lizard I Rescued

My Garden Grows Here

The Art of Controversy

by Elaine Joy Edaya Degale

I proposed to a stranger today. Not because I loved him, but because the bounties of capitalism have allowed me to do so. The past of women being meek and trampled upon, solicited for marriage, exchanged for debt as my grandmother was, those days are long gone. And to remind myself of progress, I stake a claim on my right to solicit a man for marriage. On my right to be a little less meek. On my right to trample upon the pride of men. Not because there was any ever fuss about any real thing whatsoever, but just for the simple objective truth that I am bored and the reversal of roles is both comical and satisfying.

I am a black woman who takes great joy in the art of controversy. I must preface these rhetorical explorations with the admission that these musings are a simple exercise in misbehavior because the times have allowed me to do so. The face of men being confused by our role reversals amuses me. We must create space in our lives for the beauty of the absurd. And in this absurdity we must form connections between the riddles that drive the purpose of existence, and the humor of tragedy in its less vicious forms. Let’s relish the captivating subject of love’s pursuit. Let’s encounter the myriad of threads that crochet our unspoken thoughts into a tapestry of silence. Let’s excavate the candid inclinations that fester in the fissures of our broken souls, safely tucked under the blanket of niceties as demanded by the church of the labor market. Let’s ridicule and worship the American god, capitalism, and name the freedom that its toxicity has extended to a black woman like me, who, only a few centuries ago, was its primary product, mutilated and branded in the name of profit.

Only four generations ago, women who looked like me needed a global civil rights movement to move the law in the direction of progress, which severed one of the seven remaining heads of the Hydra Monster called White Supremacy; the first one being the “peculiar institution of slavery” and the second being the Jim Crow laws as The Reconstruction Era struggled to flourish. In my opinion, seven more remained after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. I will list this here in no particular order: (i) the New Jim Crow that has institutionalized the mass incarceration of black people, (ii) the Racial Wealth Gap in the richest nation on the planet that has refused to address the issue of reparations in order to mitigate the gap in wealth and resources between whites and blacks; (iii) the brutal police killings of black people (the Hydra head that’s been injured when George Floyd died, but not severed); (iv) the societal expectation of black women as servile caretakers (a modern reiteration of sensibilities in slave-holding era); (v) the plight of the black intellectual in the public consciousness, where the black intellectual is denied space in the higher echelons of the academic enterprise as if knowledge was in itself a property of whiteness; (vi) the general pathologization of blackness in American culture despite black culture being the soul of the nation; (vii) the furtive American Caste System that has placed blackness in the bottom rung with limited opportunities for progress (unless you have an “interesting” global background).

By no intention of my own making, my skin, in all its deep caramel glory, has been a subject of envy since the beginning of human history. It has also been a subject of envy in my own dating history. It has been the subject of fascination and assumption of my meekness, which is objectively hilarious to anyone who knows me extensively. As progress wove its hands through time, I’ve approached the indictment of my blackness with a curious spirit that understands the tools of oppression and illusion. With great luck I’ve had the opportunity to harness my lived reality into a curated script that spits in the face of inequality’s ideologies, while taking great care in documenting the reactions of perpetrators who wear the veneer of progress on their sleeves, singing the songs of progress while the color of hate runs through their dark, green, jealous veins.

By no fault of my own, I’ve been willed into existence by all that is divine to become an observer of our social reality, like a sleuth of a cultural reality that I both detest and adulate. My observations, which range from the intellectual to the brutish, are approached with a near-clinical assessment, with some attempt at revealing the true dynamics and source of power: the art of naming a controversy.

The art of controversy calls to me like an unknown pleasure I’ve yet to fulfill, and once I achieve it, my heart yearns for another longing—the freedom to write, the freedom to dream. By vocation I am a young, black woman who is unremarkable. At the tender age of thirty-six, I have four academic degrees: an associate’s from a community college, a bachelor’s from a selective private institution, and two degrees from an Ivy League institution. I’ve taught as a professor at community colleges. I write a weekly column in the Philippine Daily Mirror. I’m a single mother to the most talented eight-year-old on the planet. I’m a few weeks away from opening the first black-owned cafe bookstore in Mindanao—the same region where Manny Pacquiao is from. I regard my accomplishments quite dispassionately in the privacy of my own thoughts, but I utterly enjoy wielding them as a bat against the White Supremacist Hydra that lurks within the souls of conservative, white men and women who see me mostly as an attractive masterpiece in need of taming.

“I’m a professor, not your future caretaker,” I would say.

Because I have to be.

Because I can.