deadhead

Spent twenty minutes mucking around in the front garden yesterday. It was grey and piddling rain out and also the most time I'd spent outside in days, given the recent heat wave.

Over the past few weeks, I've taken to hoarding slurpees in my freezer, luridly coloured things that ice my teeth and tongue. I've also taken to the rather clinical sound of ice cubes breaking, to the insectoid hum of our newly acquired air conditioner, and to showers that get progressively colder as I get progressively braver.


(clockwise from top left - iris, chive flower, asiatic lillies, allium)

But yesterday, with the rain, I could tromp around the garden, getting dirty and swiping at various plants that had finished their run. Fun!

(It's beastly again today, of course. Wish I knew the names of all the hot desert winds that are blowing through so I could curse them properly...)

In the interest of another kind of deadheading, today I pulled out my box of poems-in-progress, the place where I store all the clipped bundles of the various drafts of recent poems.

In the box, May Day poems jostle Fall Back poems, Wrought Substance poems chafe against Guidelines poems, while the rabble, the one-off poems that don't quite fit anywhere, attempt to fold themselves into clumsy origami.

Sooo...we'll see what gets beheaded and what makes it into both my next batch of submissions (grossly overdue, I'm ashamed to say) and the manuscript that's been sending out shoots in my head these past few months.