A winning poem in 3rd Wednesday’s annual poetry contest:

This relatively brief poem is ostensibly about a garden, but one that wastes no time finding its way, quietly and unexpectedly, into a very dark domain. Borrowing from the vivid vocabulary of more predictable poems about gardens, the speaker describes instead an environment in slow decay, while providing a warning that we, the observers, are blithely “deadheading in the clarified air.” I consider it a jarring but undeniably memorable poem, infused with the grim inevitability of mortality. – Marilyn L. Taylor, Contest judge.