Poem in Which Nature Makes an Appearance

Fatimah Asghar

Each morning my mother wandered across a bed
of jasmine petals & picked phal. Each fig bursting

with sweet flesh, a seedy caramel. We only ate fruit
my aunt says & her hands fill with the apples

of her youth. Each morning I wake to a sky
broken by buildings, the bus rings out names

of trees I have never seen grow. Chestnut. Maple.
Mountains, to me, are as loose as a bowl of baddam

but I know the soft crunch of a sidewalk in snow
or the way trees dance like ghosts along the lake

in wintertime. How when a car kisses another car
on the street it is the same as a lion catching an antelope

mid-leap. I watch YouTube videos of leopards
adopting baby monkeys & think of all the wild

kittens I have fed, how I once picked up a puppy
in a Bosnian rainstorm & held him until he stopped

shivering. But wasn't this poem about my mother?
The way she pulled jasmine petals from her mouth

& strung them like leis? Child of trees, is this same
wind in me? Lets say each aisle in the grocery store

is its own grove. There, I pluck figs. I turn them over
in my hands each morning. I tear their skin with my teeth.