The Dandelions (The Adenomyosis)
What could embolden these lurking dendrites more than a belly corpulent with estrogenic waves? In the overgrown, invaded garden, in my body, in the lawn expansive between the
road and the pale, rained-soaked house, I’m seeding tufted lesions of endometriosis,
spoiling them with gobs of caffeine, sugar, and every flit of scotch I serve neat, an
embarrassment of riches, and perhaps we all are as helpless against ourselves, our watch-face-tapping, shallow graves, against our not so quiet habits, our covert versions of
homeostasis, our slow relent, unable as we are even to halt the toothed spears of the dandelions, their glossy clustered fury, in early, when, like incited neurons they manifest
ablaze, taproots erect, smearing and sudden on the sleeping yard after so many months gone dormant. I forgot how quickly the cycle can change is all. I forgot how at first, I’m all feet
and then it’s just knees when the swells within me spatter the surfaces of what’s being pulled under, deprived of their oxygen the gasping muscles’ clench deliriously back and forth, rain
funneling into their hollow roots, and the dandelions–to which I learned my anatomy is also considerably averse, having rubbed the yellow blush-brush blooms on my face with friends
near the reservoir fence at ten, hoping to give the apples of our cheeks color like our idols and minutes after we pressed the rosettes of sickly leaves on, my cheeks bloomed virulently,
swelling until my eyes sealed shut, the white blood cells and macrophages gluing membranes together–were flowers I couldn’t see for days when they finally started to appear, when
even then my body was arranging for this rhythm, my parents wetting a washcloth and pressing it to my face to dissolve my mistake, and like them, there’s so much I want to rake
clear. Even after this long while, even after the skin has become too raw to touch, even after every year when the dandelions somehow multiply their glut, spreading indignant from the
neighbor’s yard to ours and then from ours to everyone else’s, like at first how the rogue blood started spilling from the notched uterus, then the ovary, and when its path ruled
unfettered, progressed exultantly onto the colon and liver, kidney and stomach, even the salmon pink lungs. Now the muscles. Their surfaces peppered, and when the shoots of the
dandelion pierce through the crabgrass, the ryegrass, the dead grass, you know you’re in trouble but even so this kind of trouble is somehow always the hardest to see coming, its
dazzling acid, its yellow not yet fully blossomed, biting, sour, the sharp ends of the grooved petals wholly unformed, dour, a gentle containable thing, the deceit of the dandelion
coupling with your hope that the flowers might pass you by this season until one by one they begin to loudly multiply, to unfurl, and then suddenly every lawn is their wasteland, the body
a wasteland too. You want to mow it all down so low the blades dig back the earth, till the topsoil, dry it out and start again, erase the black of your organs, you want to pull from the
lawn all the dandelions you can before your eyes swell shut, you want to swallow all the heads of the drugs to make you limp and compliant, hoverfly gone crazy, belly distended,
stupor dulling it to the pain inflicted by dandelions, by adenomyosis, but isn’t it’s better to make your peace with such persistence? Better to live skidding over rutted remedy than it is
to be plucking at the relentless stems that keep popping. (Just take the drugs religiously already, hon.) How many times can you mow the yard in a week without the neighbors
beginning to wonder if you are really just that mad? Pollen drunk. Obsessing-just-a-little-bit-bitch. And the dandelions, too, know they have you beat. From the day the first one in the
grass–its seed having flew from the lips of a girl who dipped her bike into the lawn to puff the white kernels of a blowbell, tendrils twirling through the air and delving into the earth
(She seemed happy enough at the time. Why spoil things for her?), the seeds burrowing, consecrated with a kiss which was also the permission granted to stay, to bloom and thrive
and propagate–you could never have known what you were born with: the wet interior, plentiful blood overturning to nourish the lesions, nurture their network in the tissues that
jam the muscles, seal off the labor of the organs. One day they’ll get inside those too– not a threat but a promise–the same girl will clip the squelchy stems from a ball-shaped patch and
carry them over the threshold into each house, so many dandelions tight in her fist. She’ll place them in a jar and provide them water, her desire to accumulate something outweighing
any other calculation, her lips painted red, falsies on her lashes like all the girls wear now, she’ll watch your eyes water, allergic, when you tell her thank you. You tell her how
beautiful, withdrawing into your drink, you’re not crying, not yet, muttering about how gorgeous and sharp within you the tendrils leeching, the radiant and bitter blooms.
Carey Salerno is the executive director and publisher of Alice James Books. She is the author of Shelter (2009), Tributary (2021), and the forthcoming The Hungriest Stars (Persea Books). Her poems, essays, and articles about her work as a publisher can be found in places like American Poetry Review, Poets & Writers, NPR, and The New York Times. She serves as the co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing arts at the University of Maine at Farmington. In 2021, she received the Golden Colophon Award for Independent Paradigm Publishing from CLMP for the leadership and contributions of Alice James Books. careysalerno.com