You need to wait for the summer:
sit on the stone bench by the front door
every afternoon until the sun does not let you.
That is when you know asparagus are ready for you
to pick up. Wear a pair of shoes that will not get too stuck in the sand
(or let the soil nibble instead of waiting for the whole meal of you),
forget the gloves home because it’s too hot to worry
about pricking your palms, and go to the pine tree forest.
No bag, no basket. Go.
Track the leaves turning fractal,
search the ground around them:
that is where the asparagus will be.
Hound the short and wide ones
(do not pick up the yellow ones— too sour),
the greener the better, but do not pull them up from the head;
remember the knife I told you to always have on you?
I know you forgot, so here is mine.
Slice the flesh where it becomes soft,
take only as much as your hands can carry back home.
Wash them. Do not you dare chop them to throw them into an omelet;
no granddaughter of mine wastes the green punch of the earth,
no granddaughter of mine waters down the dark heart of anything.
So a bit of olive oil in the pan, high heat,
the whole handful of asparagus, a bit of salt, two minutes,
lid on, low heat until your fingers start stinging
(reminder of the branches resisting your onslaught,
the tips learn fast to burn, the soft skin is there to take it all,
to grow harsher, deserving,
as children who do as they are told
instead of resenting life and its lessons),
take them out, put them on a plate.
A bit of sea salt. Enjoy the crop:
no hard fiber, its clean-cut sourness
impossible to find on cultivated ones.
Let your mouth prey on
the spoils. Swallow it all.
Miriam Navarro Prieto, currently focused on life-drawing preferably diverse humans, and writing poems on autobiography, ecology, gender, queerness, and the politics of memory. She translated her first self-published poem collection Todo está vivo, also available as Everything Is Alive. Her poems have been featured in The Pinch, Paranoid Tree, etc. Ecognosis, her second collection, was a finalist at the I Premio de Poesía Letraversal and will come out somehow. Her monthly bilingual newsletter-podcast is about her creative process, plants, and translated literature. She’s anxiously waiting for an acceptance for her first chapbook in English, a reflection on her Post-Spanish-Civil-War ancestry. Find her online here.