Leaves tangled & braided in limp limbs of the still surviving perennials, our yard a battlefield of trees towering at least seventy feet high, squeezing out the sun, & slowly letting go of their dead. I suited up in jeans, vest, hat, gloves, to protect myself from ticks, armed with the EGO Power cordless 56-volt lithium blower, shaped like a machine gun, the battery so heavy I held it with two hands, its intensity & vibration, a constant whhhhhhhrrrrrr, decimated all sound; red, brown, orange, yellow— the colors dazzling—went flying. I kept my finger on the trigger, scaled the blower back & forth as it scattered dead leaves into the frivolous air. Later, at night, we sipped wine & watched the sky turn navy on our deck, I said to my husband that holding that blower felt powerful, my body filled with the heat of shame at the thrill of decimating the garden. He looked at my strangely, because that is what husbands sometimes do, but I was serious. Is there murder in the heart, I wonder. No matter how often I put my finger on the trigger, there was still the stray leaf, & the ones that keep falling like a rain of color & the eerie calmness after the battery died enough to sustain my disbelief.

From Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems by Jill Bialosky. Reprinted by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Jill Bialosky.