The Orchard Path

Victoria Addis

I was told

to walk the orchard path like I wasn’t holding

anything sharp.

(But I was.)

The nettles knew.

They touched my ankles like

Yes, girl, we sting too.

The sky did its usual

passive aggressive thing—

you know, that

vast polite greyness. Like it

wasn’t going to rain but it could.

And it might.

The apple trees had bent

from too many years of being picked

at. They said nothing.

I listened hard to their silence.

It was like a woman being interrupted.

Somewhere a foxglove

was blooming too fast.

It didn’t ask permission,

and that was the point.

Nobody talks about hellebore.

Or how it kills

quietly.

(I think about hellebore more than I should.)

I was not angry.

I was just—

collected. Like rosehips after frost.

There is a kind of anger that curdles

into patience.

Which is worse.

(Ask the hawthorn.)

A crow watched me

the way a priest watches

a confession stall—

like he knew something and

was waiting for me

to admit it.

I won’t.

Instead I’ll press

my rage into jam jars

and label them plum, sloe, blackcurrant.

No one needs to know

what’s really in there.

But when they open it—

they’ll taste it.

VICTORIA ADDIS is a poet, writer and teacher living and working in the East Midlands region of the UK.

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Postcolonial-settlement’s daughter

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On Patience