"Meditation Garden" by Alexandra Burack

When they thought I had breast cancer, my grandmother worked a bare-handed half-acre to plant a meditation garden. Roses, mostly, antique tea roses with a scent she vowed would cure me, whatever I had. I wondered what the scent of rose was other than rose. For weeks when we didn’t know if some dark ruin had rooted itself in me, Nana dug, seeded, tilled, staked, watered: her invocation to deity. I marveled that the domesticated field appeared to turn itself over every night, so each sun filled the rose-roots of rows of white, pink, scarlet, and peach. The god, Nana said, that most prayed to deserted her sixty years ago, taking parents, a sister, three brothers, in-laws, and a nearly-born son to a land she knew was just a place in a story. So she planted. One garden bred another, then two, then a tiered sloping distance beyond rose to lilac, iris, peony, phlox, and lavender. No supernatural overseer in that valley; only the flowers asserted possible ways to thrive: vivid serrated leaves, suede buds, deep and heady scents of chilled apple, pear, and lemon soaked in rosewater. I was 14, and when tests came back negative, we daily rambled the plush triumph of flowers, and she would grasp my hand in her impossibly soft one, exquisite dirt nestled under each ridged and indestructible nail.

Alexandra Burack is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, editor, and author of On the Verge (Plinth Books). Her recent work has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Ink & Marrow, FreezeRay Poetry, $ Poetry is Currency, and Poetica Magazine, and is forthcoming in Broad River Review. She serves as a Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, and is Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ).