Julia McDaniel

From the Dirt of the Dream Orchard

Our plum tree was dying—full of bleak, blue-
streaked pearls. Not even the birds were tempted.
They sang in other trees, sat in the neighbors’
branches, their wings still as your sleep

in the early mornings, watching me as I picked.
I woke to clasp the berries in my palms. Collecting
my bearings. Stone or fruit or weathervane.
Something to hold before the newspaper, the scrape

of kitchen table, your hands clutching the bulk-
price napkins, a fastening absent of prayer. Outside,
a single bird quavered in its chord. You looked past
at the plums, rustling free, and muttered an apology.

There was nothing I could say. Not: the plum tree is dying
because it’s been deserted. Not even: how soon
will you leave? When we hacked the tree down
the next morning, a nest fell whole among the leaves.

I had a blackberry dream. Kernels of night

burst
beneath the seams of sleep.

You held a crow in your teeth.

It must have tasted like doused leaves: mineral, more familiar than blood or earth—
somehow saccharine, rust caked with powdered sugar.
The sapped edge of

your mouth offered the bird.

But I had no shelter

for a bird. My body was no longer

a body.
Instead an atlas of roots fed by these

diminishing sweetnesses:

fruit we picked
from the dirt of
the dream orchard,
berries an indigo
not yet invented.

A series of words fluttering in the dyed breeze of my mouth—

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A former community organizer, Julia McDaniel earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, where her honors include a 2021 Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award, judged by Tommye Blount and Vievee Francis, and 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She was also a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Emerging Poet Prize. Currently, she is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing, a writer for the Center for the Education of Women+ at the University of Michigan and a youth workshop leader at Thurber House Literary Center in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Her work is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal.