My Mother's Rose Garden

Joni Mitchell sang, paved paradise.
That's what the new owners did—
killed the bushes
in the back garden,
where the neighbor's kid used to shoot up.
He's dead too.
There's more than one way to seek paradise.

Embroidered on one of my shawls:
Life is a bed of roses.

My mother let her rose bushes breed
every which way, had stricter rules
for her daughter.
The garden and the daughter
did what they wanted, a blossom boom,

taken for granted. Joni, Joni—
we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone,
though my mother grew the best,
our terrible thorns.

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book and a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. She has co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, forthcoming in 2022 from Milk and Cake Press. www.susanahcase.com.