I must be in the woods again with the boys,
or so my grandmother thinks as she talks to my aunt.
I browse old geography magazines in the attic.
I open the journals upside down and shake them
till all the letters fall and I sow these letters
in cracks between the floorboards.

Now I’m in the attic woods
of coniferous and broad-leaf
trees under the roof, this wooden cloud.
I climb on a birch, daring it to become
a rocket on which I could go
look for a piece of private skyland.
As the tree roots snake down below
to the kitchen and the living room
I try to pull them up but the floor begins to crack.

My starving forest needs water to survive,
yet I don’t want it to ruin my grandmother’s house
and don’t let roots go deep down into the ground.
Instead, I shrink each tree with a light touch
and arrange all of them inside my backpack.

Bent, I tiptoe down the stairs, down the dirt road,
Past the neighbor whose saw cuts through a white bark,
past the stream surveilled by dragonflies
to the woods where my grandmother thought I played.
I plan to bury my attic woods in the clearing.
But instead I tie each trunk I made to the trees
that surround the rectangle of needles and grass.

I tie a hundred trees I grew out of letter seeds
to a hundred pines, beeches, and oaks
like the wounded to be carried to safety.
Before I leave, I beg them not to give up, to wait
till they are strong enough to stand on their own.

—

Agnieszka Tworek was born and raised in Poland. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Diode, Spillway, and The Best American Poetry 2018. She lives in Vermont.