Juliana Gray | Mulching the President | Poets Resist

Juliana Gray’s third poetry collection, Honeymoon Palsy, was published by Measure Press in 2017. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Chattahoochee Review, NELLE, Dunes Review, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.

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Also by Juliana Gray: Honeymoon Palsy Roleplay The Man Under My Skin

Poets Resist
Edited by Matty Layne Glasgow
October 21, 2019

Juliana Gray

Mulching the President

In the garden, it’s easy — tempting — to forget the world, slip into pleasures of morning sun, tomatoes and squash in their gawky teenage phase, leggy and stooped, cautiously opening their first true leaves. The world returns when I lay down sheets of winter’s New York Times and cover them with sweet bedding hay. Forgotten movies, obits, hockey scores, and yes, that hateful face, that open mouth filled with hard white seeds — all buried under mats of dried grass. The farmer who sold me the hay shook his head, told me how dairy farmers were struggling, how some in this state had lost themselves in debt and taken their own lives. Now, I cut the twine from the bales and find flowers inside, faded and pressed as if between the pages of a Victorian ladies’ book. I turn that face, that rotten pumpkin, toward the welcoming earth where it will keep down weeds, his quoted words softening in summer rain, doing just a little good, goddammit, before his hate and all of history returns to soil.