Poetry By
Robin Merrill
Published on: 10/30/2007
Ferris Rhubarb
My first spring in the old house, the snow melted and underneath fifty years worth of tenants' cigarette butts, dog poop, and old-fashioned trash left by drive-by teenagers, there was the rhubarb. Property line twenty inches from the house, eighteen were taken up by rhubarb as proud as I'm sure the Ferrises were when they built this town out of dust and when they faced a depression that made them sell it all save the main house and the twenty inches on each side, when they sat on this front porch in long black dresses and toked on opium, when they pinched pennies between their toes and sold farm fresh eggs to pay off the wolves, when they planted the perennial rhubarb. It can't be killed, despite the dogs and winters and the evolution of a small dirt town, despite all the Ferrises migrating south, dying off or changing names, their rhubarb is clean and strong this spring and I just found it.
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