After the Eleven O’clock news
my sister enters her kitchen, dons knee pads
sprays herself with Deep Woods Off
grabs the flashlight, the dustbuster.
 
She says she has to dustbust the garden 
each and every night or the earwigs
and black beetles will eat everything
and the best garden in the neighborhood
(heck, in the city and perhaps the world)
will be gone. 
 
She strides straight into her plants 
where the stone wall catches the first flash 
of light and the shadows of stalks bent 
against it. Then light bobs, stalks shake
Dustbuster sounds and maniacal laughter 
cuts the air. Seconds later, more stalks obey 
her hands, more bugs meet their suctioned fate. 
 
Early summer blooms (each morning 
glory, black-eyed susan, dahlia, delphinium) 
meet her in manic masquerade. She kneels 
she tips, she vacuums, she shrieks as she 
readies her garden for darkness of night.
 
And when she enters her kitchen 
thirty minutes later, she brags about all 
the black blissful bugs, still very much alive 
and crawling in the Dustbuster’s clear blue canister. 
She smiles at me, wraps her trap in plastic wrap
smiles again as she bands it in rubber
sets the bugs to die on the dining room table. 
Next morning, she counts them with pencil 
one hundred fifty-seven slowly suffocated bugs. 
 
I speak not a word, not even in the morning
when trapped into driving the car 
I marvel at all the flowering gardens in all 
the yards on both sides of her street.
                        

Mother’s eyes could break a mirror
could sear a sidewalk
with enough sun
to start a fire.
 
I knew to practice smiling
to walk across on tiptoe
to cross my eyes until
she disappeared in their apex.
 
“You are so heavy,” she said
“the sidewalk will break beneath you”
and two more pieces of me
went empty.
 
After my eyes cracked into crying
her coming kiss healed nothing.