Harvesting Figs on the Fourth of July
in the yard behind my house, i am learning to relate with a fig tree. it usually
blooms midsummer, in the dripping Georgia heat, wet with thunderstorms
and coastal breeze.
i watch for weeks as syconiums round themselves out from the end of thin
branches like pink bubbles of gum we might blow past our lips. i do not feel
the need to beat the cardinals and mockingbirds to the bounty. i like that we
can share together the inflorescence of a tree i never planted. we pick our
plenty, some fat and velvet sagging, some frozen in becoming, not to grow
past green. which is to say hard. unopened to a life and its brutalities. the
possibilities of letting fruit labored lay rotting at the feet. i think about how
eating a fig is like eating my own ovary. how each time the state builds a
prison, it uses the walls of our hearts. in the name of civilization, leaves a
barbed wire bloom in its wake. a fig wasp lands briefly on the ridge of a leaf.
she will freely give her corpse to the fig. she does this so she can lay her eggs
within its burgeoning womb–its nursery of flowers–and die among them so
the children can take of her body. i think about how the flowers honor her,
transmute her. how here, of the total number of humans in cages, 67% are
mothers. how, every year, 50 to 100 women birth their children in nurseries of
concrete and steel.
in my yard, i practice building a relationship with a fig tree. her pink tipped
cackle. we are only the turn of her leaves. that girl… is simply howling.
la donna scandalosa
the lesson
each waxen
maggot
a blessing
it is
still also
you
who will
get the rats
Alyssa Canepa (she/her) received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in 2025 and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Wyoming in 2020. Originally from Wyoming, Alyssa is an educator, poet, and activist in various communities across Savannah, Georgia. Her creative work is featured in local zines across Wyoming, California, and Georgia as well as Anti-Heroin Chic, Bombay Gin and Hood of Bone. She has also featured her multimedia work at the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Wyoming.
