Julia McDaniel

The Opposite of Gardening

The zucchini blossom in the grit of October, a season that,
despite how people in this town claim to love it, is like drinking
the last bit of cooled-off coffee from the pot, and though I should
be humbled by how life finds a way, what I say to the late joy of
emerald squash is simply fuck you. Fuck you for arriving well after
I abandoned my regimen of water and light and compost bins
and weeding and fought off four or more types of suburban
vermin—so fucking long after I stopped being able to stand
nursing my mug in the harsher, less forgiving air. I could be
softer. I could remind the glossy, spreading skins that I wanted
to watch some small thing grow, speaking to the zucchini as though
my partner or my neighbor was listening. So listen: I wanted to
coax something back from the earth. Instead it is late October
and I have three sizeable, pristine zucchini that survived two frosts
and a baptism of beetles and have absolutely nothing to do with me.

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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.