by Tom Laichas
GARDENIAS
GARDENIAS ARE OLD NEIGHBOR flowers, blossoming in the last century. They
ornament old homes, clapboard homes, greened up yards moistened by
oscillating sprinklers.
So too the lantanas. One night in an ancient annum, when Venice California
lawned from end to end, a Douglas Aircraft engineer said to his wife, Let’s plant
lantanas. They’ll bring butterflies. And so, in that wide front yard, lantanas
luminesced, bright as color tee-vees.
In that same annum, mothers warned their children: don’t eat the oleander—it’s
poisonous. Against dark green leaves, narrow as lancets, little white flowers
glowed ice-white. No one thought to pull it out.
And in that annum, a schoolteacher, an East Coast transplant, asked her neighbor,
What’s an avocado? The neighbor taught her how to turn the fruit into a festive
Mexican dip, gave her a few limes, and made her coffee.
That was the day the hollyhocks bloomed, some pink, some blue, wide as sun-
faced stars. A visiting cousin said: Hollyhocks need heat. Can’t grow em at the
beach. But the hollyhocks had rooted deep, grown beanstalk-tall in empty lots and
untended side yards.
In those days, swallowtails, bumblebees and cabbage whites flocked like birds.
Salamanders burrowed under garden border brickwork. Summer rains forced
worms to surface. Beached on sidewalk concrete, there was no way back. Red
ants fought centipedes for all that good jerked meat.
The salamanders are long gone. Weak with whiteflies and mildew, the old plantings
wilt. Neighbors sleep on mattresses stuffed with bad news.
But look here: scarlet gardenias edge a yard round an old house on 6th and
Brooks. A lemon tree fruits. A milkweed flowers.
TOM LAICHAS’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, Aji, La Piccioletta Barca, Evening Street Review, Monday Night, Ambit, and elsewhere. He is the author of the collection Empire of Eden (High Window Press, 2019) and the chapbook Sixty-Three Photographs at the End of a War (3.1 Press, 2021).