If a tree could be called a forest, my mother has a garden beneath the back wall-                                                   okra in a grow-bag, tomato in a pot. Watered by the overflowing tank sometimes, & sometimes by rain, when the little things make it more than just a noise outside the window- the whole family pausing, each from their own, independently discovering a strange island-                                                   Is it raining, mother asks.                                                  It is raining, father answers.                                                  It is lightning, sister says, & will thunder. Little things-                            like frogs climbing the wall next to the garden, & bathroom doors swelling up in an available desire of ajarness, a voluntary retirement.             On sunnier days- mother complains that the okras are too soft, don't get all they want from true earth, & tomatoes have to be picked orange, because it doesn't rhyme, & squirrels bite into ripe red ones like a boast. True earth-                          I imagine trees talking in lava under crust, getting all they want, not in sounds but in light or in things between light & sound, like a thought, a smoke, a stuck-out tongue, a secret. I imagine trees doing hushed paperwork & then wash my face- like a long song, or a short one sang slowly- with a soap in the shape of things-                                                  a rose, the pyramids, a Pokémon, the moon. & at the midnight tick-tock of the clock I'm a brick more, not of a wall but of something so expansive that it is, becomes, the very opposite of a wall, something which can encapsulate my mother's garden in all its glory & all its wants. (First published in isacoustic)