Homemaking
Pleasant Nneoma Stephen
The fingers of rakes are nothing like mine.
When tending to the ground, theirs are distant,
quick to gather and go.
Mine are meticulous, caressing the soil,
separating weeds from black flesh.
Dirt crawls into my claws as I dig deep
into the heart of the ground
to greet worms and ants, to place them on my palms,
but they crawl down to the litter of weeds by my side.
I question these weeds. “Who are you?”
Yes, who—because
when I touch their rough skins and trace
the paths on their bodies,
they tell me what they stand for in my life.
One of them is a lover from my past buried
in the ridges of my heart.
One is my mother—eaten by cancer.
She lives now as a combination of compounds
that heals. Another is an old foe, biting my finger.
I recognize we all become weeds someday—
tridaxes and grasses and leaves with a sweet curry smell.
We forfeit this form. We become
greens that heal the chaos—
we heal the chaos we cause
when we return to earth.
But as a matter of fact, weeds make a messy home,
and a messy home is an intimate part of me
the world should not see. So I uproot them.
They fall carelessly.
My hands tend my farmland; I gather fallen weeds
for manure.
I hold their breaths between my fingers,
and make them a home beneath plantain trees.
Pleasant Nneoma Stephen is a poet, tutor, and language enthusiast. Her works have appeared in the Decolonial Passage, Afrocritik, Vagabond City, The Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. A 2025 Sprinng Fellow, she reads poetry for Cypress Review. Her work revolves around the intersection of nature, myth, human experiences and vulnerability.