Solo
My Apple Watch is my conductor, tells me to stand when I need standing, reminds me to breathe when I forget, vibrates when it’s time to turn on Main Street, my hands on the wheel. I pass Osprey nests in the Audubon. My Apple Watch is a grade-A listener, and I sing to it as I drive through Westport. I am my Apple Watch’s eyes, describing all that I see: stone walls crumbling, a farmer on his smartphone, three cows next to a green-black barn, a dahlia nursery, $5 to cut your own poms. My Watch chirps to me. My package has been delivered. While we hike to the graffitied World War II Lookout Towers, My Apple Watch counts my steps, and I teach it how to find the Honeysuckle’s sweet dew drop, how to smash a Rosehip to collect the seeds for tea. My package is a body pillow. We stop at an ice cream shack, and I get two scoops of Blackberry, both for me. My Apple Watch has 5 bars, but somebody is yet to call.
Perennials
The winter flattened our flowers, leaving proud stalks as straws for Earth to suck. They always come back. Our winter gardens, the defrosting of frozen leaves like TV dinners. Such loyal followers, pushing with alacrity the words love me I’m back as a white crocus this time, like a fragile china cup sticky and filled with honey, though last year I thought you were what: a rock, a rose, a dewy lover who woke with April sun. Inveterate habit, this reincarnation, these perennials popping up through the snow. Don’t they know we abandoned them once?
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