We built the kitchen garden after the second recovery,
the whole street together in a kind of discovery
that the act of growing something past the emergency
was the work of making permanence out of temporary.
The kitchen garden is the community’s declaration
that the crisis does not end the aspiration.
The kitchen garden is the place where the after begins,
where the growing season earns its wins.
We divided the lot behind the water tower equally,
twelve plots of approximately the same area, freely
given by the landowner who lived across the road
because he’d watched the crisis and it had changed his code.
The first thing planted was the fast-maturing bean,
because it fills the gap between the hunger and the green
of the longer crops, because you plant for now first
before you plant for later, that’s the order of the thirst.
By the end of the first season twelve households had harvest,
small but real, and the act of harvest
restores something in the body that the famine took away,
the sense that you participate in what you eat today.
The kitchen garden is five years old and bigger now,
it has a waiting list, which is the specific vow
that plenty makes when it grows from the careful dirt
of the after-famine planting, from the careful work.