ISSUE FOUR: March, 2020

RINSE

by MARTINA LITTY

I’m drowning outside. Your grandma picks okra and cucumbers before we get to your house, and she leaves them on the ground. The sunset drenches every plant.

When we get out of your car, I follow you into the backyard with the wheelbarrow. We pick the vegetables up from where they sleep on the earth and I wheel them around. I swim laps around you. My arms are not tired. The handles are wooden. The wheel makes a path where it presses the grass down.

We go back to the front yard, and I put most of the cucumbers to bed in a woven basket. Your backs strains when you lift it; it weighs more than a baby. You carry it inside and I stay on the front porch.

Your grandma lets me choose from the okra and the rest of the cucumbers.

“For your mama,” she says.

I get a handful of okra real quick, but I’m more selective with the cucumbers. You like the white ones the best for their sweetness, so I take the ones that are the most green because I know, to me, they will just taste like water. I plan to eat them all myself.

You bring me a Walmart bag and I nestle the vegetables in the plastic. I get in my car. The Walmart bag calls shotgun. Wet earth churns under my tires until I hit asphalt. There’s dirt under my fingernails. I eat a cucumber without cutting the ends off.

 lake mud—
I lament you
in the shower

MARTINA LITTY is a writer and poet from Laurinburg, North Carolina. She attended the International Writing Program Summer Institute of 2019, and she currently studies creative writing at UNC Wilmington. More of her work has appeared or will appear in Typehouse Magazine, Poets Reading the News, and semicolon, among others.