When I last saw Murray, he told me how he was worried
about the asparagus in Manawatū. It had been raining
too much. Now I’m where asparagus is cheap, I’ve eaten
so many asparagus lately I’m not only peeing
green, I took a dump so pungent
I heard someone gasp in the next-door stall
even before it hit the water:
the sort of mossy log you’d like to call a friend over to admire
but only a younger sister could maintain interest in dispatches
of such intimacy, and mine
has lost her appetite. Back in Manawatū
Murray proved correct: the water table flooded and asparagus cost
six dollars in the shops while the crops still in the ground either
drowned or rotted from phytophthora—which, now
that I think of it, probably held a special concern for Murray,
a podiatrist who has encountered his share of fungal rot.
Remembering this about Murray, who is also called Merve,
I searched the difference between warts
and verrucas on DermNetNZ.
Warts, it turns out, thrive in nostrils and can sprout
tendrils like the star-burst
nose of a mole. As Merve might have told me.
I didn’t tell Merve that I once spent fourteen dollars on asparagus
at Fresh Garden in Fort Greene. It was an accident. My mother, a big advocate
of DermNet, almost cried to hear it
fourteen dollars. Instead I say to Merve that I don’t bother with roasting but boil
asparagus in a shallow skillet
so I can watch the water moving and the green turning, see
the exact moment the asparagus is ready to eat—
Evangeline Riddiford Graham is an artist and writer from Aotearoa. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks La belle dame avec les mains vertes (Compound Press, 2019), and Ginesthoi (hard press, 2017). She is in the second year of the New School Creative Writing MFA and lives in Queens.
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