I have fisted a landful of grass and I have rubbed it. I have rubbed itacross the torso of my belonging. These little possessions, how I fiendon them, call them mine. My pockets lined with cuts. A satin, leaking gel.I do not miss the world I never asked for. That’s not it. A house is nothingbut a suffocation of grasses. None, I want. I force a newborn from my mind.A limb entwined with mine. I forget the word for minefield. I walk in thisforgetting. The swirl of my daughter’s hair is silken, not there. I wade inthe muck of not, brothered by gray waters, fugitive dust. A new motheron Instagram, the caption, “Babies smell so good.” But I can’t. The windcuts a line across a stone lion slowly. It takes years to etch. Programsemerge, calls for new budgets, mitigation plans, new insurance laws.Let me contain this how I cannot the girl I dreamed named Daisy. Adehisced sprout. Poison ivy, its ecological importance. I dig into my totebag and produce a recording device. To record this interview, do I haveconsent? Fat white berries fruit as birds migrate south. A new developmentpumps up leaded water, an offering. The daughter blooms as a throat constriction.I respond to dating apps. Something mothers in me as it did when I readthe suicided student’s poems. Bees are the hive or the loss itself. Something erasesin the green. But the words are sometimes beautiful. Cadmium. I am notphosphorus. Nor iridium. A world outside leaches in. I equivocate whenpleasured. I lock the door, bolt it shut. And I itch at the borders of subdivisionsin my head. Learn I am not no longer not immune to the urushiol of contracts,the living oil of greedy men constructing high-rises and future evictions. Concretepartitions to keep a fire burning one unit entire. The exurban dream of it all—to enter is to have the ability to exit. My throat inflamed with understory, itsdiminishment part of an incremental payment plan. You wished me to understandtop-down economics, third-party predators, the moneyed saliva of ownership.Daisy in chains, a daughter I never. A housing agent screams into a bouquet of micsand far from here, the ivy tickles the snout of a doe. She disappears like a Cher songinto ambient techno frost. I carry the elsewhere buzz of life under my nails, digging.