trash dryads, bad news
characters, not an old tree
for miles around. Delinquents,
they lean on the chain link fences
shout insults at prim shaggy cedars
inside the back yards. no one
cares for them; cut them back
to the treeline, let them sort out
their own gangling business,
their liminal turf between masjid
and cul de sacs. the dryads try out
barbed wire anklets, smoke kudzu,
toss branches at the tinkertoy houses,
push on those fences with the patience
of teenagers plotting senior skip day.
the dryads call to the white dog, coax her
under the fence, get a smear of sacrificial
blood for their trouble before she runs off;
these pathetic lines of trees that can't
be a forest but can build up undergrowth
full and sharp as a plucked eyebrow.
The fence is slowly bending and I have
a pail of salt. but the dryad digging in
her elbows is younger than me. it's
a dilemma, and it's planting season,
boxes of tomatoes bursting up from
neatly raised beds. I can let her be
for another summer at least, let them jeer,
loom with their abbreviated
branches while the days are long,
hold cold decisions for colder weather,
cooler heads, keep the white dog on a lead,
let the dryads have the run of the fence line,
too-skinny, pallid, slumped, a rebuke to
the pampered Bradford pears spewing pollen,
a gaggle of tree-girls who can't fully root,
can't grow to wisdom, can't stop crowding,
but bristle in defiance of developers, push
with the patience of growth against fences
unaware of buckets of salt and liability
insurance, knowing only that they deserve
better than perpetual adolescence in bad soil.
Elizabeth R. McClellan is a domestic and sexual violence attorney by day and a poet in the margins. Their work has appeared in Girls Who Love Monsters, Utopia Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Dreams and Nightmares, Illumen Magazine, Rejection Letters and many others. They are a disabled gender/queer demisexual poet writing on unceded Quapaw and Chikashsha Yaki land. Follow them on Twitter @popelizbet or on Patreon at ermcclellan.