We have this tree, a weed tree.

It sprouts from a bush in our hedge along the driveway.

Disrupting the sight line

pushing its branches up to the sky like

A handful of pixie sticks

Pool chemicals will kill it says the gardener

Probably kill the bush too though

So yearly he climbs over the wall and hacks it down and

It disappears

We win for a whack-a-mole second

Until it comes back

Waving the victory flag

And we sigh.

But this morning that changed.

This morning the Spring dawn woke the dogs

And they woke me with soft sounds and hard stares

To go outside and do their dog things and eat the new grass

With that wide open mouth smacking

And I saw it

The tree, the weed

The morning sun that woke the dogs

Found the weed tree too

Above the sight line

Above the bush

And turned it to gold

Perfect Alchemy

The leaves glimmered like the plastic pirate doubloons

preschool teachers bury in the sandbox for the children to find so

their imaginations will take flight on finding

something that shouldn’t be there

their little fingers closing around it and pulling it from the sand

running to show you the treasure they found

How did that get there? You ask.

Must be something special that brought it here

something magical

in an unexpected place

Just like the weed tree

Turning gold in the morning light

We spent four days in a phonebooth

Braced against the metal

Faces on the cool glass

Seven of us stacked

Kickers tucked; claws retracted

I heard your digitized pants

Braced as we were in our box

We tried not to hurt each other

We tried not to get hurt

Muscles strained to keep the balance

We held onto the space between us where we could breathe

Where we could feel each other’s warmth

We froze and muted and glitched

We traded our soft bodies for zeros and ones

For pixels and bandwidth

Crackling, ship-to-shore, morse coded smoke signals

I must have longed for your voice

Even though I never heard it before.