In her grief she turns to gardening. Hours outdoors, hands buried in dark soil. Scents of earth and green carry her through the days. Evenings, she browses seed catalogues, maps out plans in a spiral notebook. She turns her back to the family photos on the wall. Cannot bear to look at them, cannot bear to take them down.

spring funerals—
purple masses 
of lilacs 

She sleeps poorly, turns to the glow of her phone in the dark, looking up the old ways of growing, the old names, the missing fruits of former times. One night she orders seeds from overseas, described as offering ancient gifts. When the package arrives, double-boxed on her doorstep, she follows directions carefully: pots the moon-pale nub in the enclosed mixture of compost, wildfire ash, and dust from the rubble of a besieged city. As instructed, she adds one hair pulled from the back of her head, then moistens everything with warm milk and a drop of blood from the thumb of her left hand.

blue moon 
across the silvered grass 
dewy footprints 

When the tender shoot reaches upward, she speaks to it, believes it hears. She carries it with her from room to room. At four weeks, it is tall as her hand. At six, a single blossom, sweet-scented, purple. At eight, a dusk-blue fruit. The morning after the last day of the ninth week, she plucks it as directed, bites delicately, swallows. Then licks clean the oblong pit that fills her palm, nuzzling the two soft spots of gray. With the warmth of her breath, it trembles.

beside the churchyard 
a sad-eyed crone 
sells fairy tales 

Jennifer L. Freed’s

collection When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems, exploring themes of identity, health, and care-giving in the aftermath of her mother’s stroke, was a finalist for the 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Prize. In the 2025 Eric Hoffer Awards, it received three distinctions: finalist for the Medal Provocateur, second place for Legacy Non-fiction, and Grand Prize short list. Her parents continue to inhabit her poetry. Recent poems appear in Atlanta Review, Rust and Moth, Sheila-na-Gig, Vox Populi, What the House Knows, and others. She lives in Massachusetts.

Author’s website: https://jfreed.weebly.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Gravity, Ms. Freed’s first haibun, published in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 28, April 2025)

⚡ Six Words in an Ellen Bass Poem Take Me Back To My Brother’s Hospital Room in Atlanta Review (Spring/Summer 2025)

⚡ List of Publications at the author’s website