When we cut back
your mother's chinaberry tree
she didn't quite cooperate,
didn't go peacefully.

Storms were coming in.
A storm was rolling out.
I Googled her.
I like to know about

a thing before I do
it harm. Pride-of-India,
Texas Umbrella, Persian Lilac,
Bead Tree and Japonica –

a name for every home.
A crime for every alias.
I clicked her yellow fruit –
rock-hard, poisonous –

cut her leaflets – toothed, blue-green
and toxic – dragged along her bark –
a curative though deadly,
pasted the buff, hallmark

fissures wrenched tight
across her purpled torso
elongating her pain,
a late El Greco

(though each spring she'd burst
in drooping lilac panicles).
Your mother wasn't well.
Sport utility vehicles,

two of them next door
plus a brand new fence,
the storm, her terrible cough,
impeccable evidence

that the dead limb-
one of three in the trunk's braid –
would cleave off easy
(wrong – again). I was afraid.

Lyric and decorative
foreign-born Melia,
a transplanted Ruth,
invasive, diligent Medea

wild as the bow saw bit
into her soft back.
We got her down,
her snapping twigs black

with your blood and my blood,
the sheeted sweat, the flecks of skin,
a ritual we'd do once
and be done with and then

you watched me jump.
I crushed her spine.
We left her by the road.
What's yours is mine

and what is mine may well
be yours. I think. We're both givers.
It was getting late.
We looked down: ants, carpenters

sifting their wreckage,
dirt, dried pith, broken phloem,
pale larvae clamped tight in black jaws.
There – there was the poem.


By Bradford Gray Telford's Perfect Hurt