Fallow
My daughter digs a little hole with the end of a stick and drops
two orange seeds in it. “So we can have two orange trees,” she says
then wonders if she planted them too close to one another. I tell her
oh, it’s okay, they’ll make room for each other,
not wanting to tell her that grocery store oranges
are bombarded with radiation before being put on the shelves
that no matter how many seeds she plants in the yard
we will never have an orange grove out here.
Over the years, she’s planted grapefruit seeds, apple seeds,
seeds from strange, impulsively-bought fruits
and none of them have put out much more than a tiny leaf,
usually nothing. Our garden is a forest thwarted
like the yards in Chernobyl
full of tiny, sterile plants, flowers with no scent
and spiders that never spin the same web twice.