Leaves tangled & braided in limp limbs
of the still surviving perennials, our yard a battlefield
of trees towering at least seventy feet high, squeezing out the sun,
& slowly letting go of their dead. I suited up in jeans,
vest, hat, gloves, to protect myself from ticks,
armed with the EGO Power cordless 56-volt lithium
blower, shaped like a machine gun, the battery so heavy
I held it with two hands,
its intensity & vibration, a constant whhhhhhhrrrrrr,
decimated all sound; red, brown, orange, yellow—
the colors dazzling—went flying.
I kept my finger on the trigger, scaled the blower back & forth
as it scattered dead leaves into the frivolous air.
Later, at night, we sipped wine & watched
the sky turn navy on our deck,
I said to my husband that holding that blower
felt powerful, my body filled with the heat
of shame at the thrill of decimating
the garden. He looked at my strangely,
because that is what husbands sometimes do,
but I was serious. Is there murder
in the heart, I wonder.
No matter how often I put my finger
on the trigger, there was still the stray leaf,
& the ones that keep falling like a rain of color
& the eerie calmness after the battery died
enough to sustain my disbelief.
_________________________
From Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems by Jill Bialosky. Reprinted by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Jill Bialosky.
Jill Bialosky
Jill Bialosky is the author of six acclaimed collections of poetry, three critically acclaimed novels, and two memoirs, including History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life, a New York Times bestseller. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Poetry; The New Yorker; The Atlantic; Harper’s Magazine; O, The Oprah Magazine; The Kenyon Review; Harvard Review; and The Paris Review, among other publications. She is executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton & Company. Her work has been a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Books for a Better Life Awards. In 2014, she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She lives in New York City.
