Death in the Garden
Jehanne Dubrow
That night, there came from outside
a cry of something being killed.
Squirrel or rabbit—I couldn’t tell.
I only knew the screeching was skinned
of vowels, like a text uncodified.
I stood then in the brief margin of porchlight.
I wanted to be brave enough to walk
across the horseherb, the groundcover
punctuated with a thousand, pointed stars.
The garden was suddenly terrible,
spiked leaves and petals like delicate
parentheses. It was like that passage
when Eve discovers there will be a door
called dying, a field beyond the fence
where the body lifts into dust, more
weightless even than dandelion seeds,
and oh, she wants to stay planted,
undispersed, unscattered by the wind.
The cry continued. My husband dreamed
inert in another room, his ear
pressed to a pillow filled with the hush
of plucked feathers. And the next morning
nothing to show of last night’s death.
Still the garden cried out, explain me.
I read its bareness to mean: sometimes
no one else will hear the pain
extracted from a mouth. I might listen
alone forever in the dark. It might be mine
to write down that sound, that cry
a glinting tooth, that cry an evening marked
with diacritics. Perhaps untranslatable.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction and ten poetry collections, including most recently Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). Her writing has appeared in New England Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
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