“Poem in Which I Should Write About Cain, but I’m Tired of Writing About Death,” a Poem By Diamond Forde

O instead, a houseplant arching a trellis
of its own strong stems, elephant ear,
Colocasia, what my Aunt Cee called Alice,
ready for the sure mothering
of her own mother. She tended Alice
with the surgical heed of a woman
seaming silver to the sharp ends
of the moon, & even when she yelled at us for
crawling through the jungle-mess
of Alice’s large leaves, when we scattered soil so
far she’d find perlite wedged inside
the treadmill, sometimes she’d still let me
water or cull the gilded curls
of a dead sprout hung like a wrung-out
washcloth, & in my hands, I think she saw
a potential to dig, to muck deep
into the manure of my imagination, to sprout
offshoots I’ll plant in someone else
someday, when I am not afraid
to think of myself as a god large enough
that every heart-shaped leaf dicing light
to dust could beat in my own chest,
& I’ve never made a life, but I’ve reached
into the refuse they make of us,
found hearts hardy as crocus bulbs,
& in this poem I will plant a world for women
where kudzu climbs & is wanted.

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Excerpted from The Book of Alice. Copyright © 2025 by Diamond Forde. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.