Colleen S. Harris

Planting Cabbages and Other Sensible Human Things

“I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.” – Michel de Montaigne

I do not plant cabbages like Montaigne,
but would be happy for death to find me
mid-hobby on a grey Tuesday,

fingering acrylic yarn in an array
of plums for my latest blanket,
or happily shifting my books

this way, and that, the simple
joy of organizing my library, let me
die with warm hands on these old pages.

On second thought,
I want death to find me
already dangling by fingertips

from a fifth-story ledge, finally
finding the courage to climb
out, inch by inch, to look over

the sprawled body of my sleeping
city, every part lit by lights like
Klimt’s flowers cheering a woman’s

gold dress. Let the atomic blast
crisp me in the arms, on the lips
of a man way out of my league

who took me to bed without giving
me time to take off my boots or
worry whether he might see

the pooch of my middle-aged
belly. Let the fire-flash find me
walking into the cymbal-crash

waves of a December Pacific,
barbaric bathtub of the old gods.
I do not want to be planting

cabbages, tame, on my knees
in the dirt. Let me die a wildfire
queen, brave, teeth bared, tits out.

Colleen S. Harris earned her MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (forthcoming 2025), Babylon Songs (forthcoming 2026), These Terrible Sacraments (2010, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (2011), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (2009), and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone (forthcoming 2025), That Reckless Sound (2014), and Some Assembly Required (2014). You can find her as @warmaiden on Instagram/Bluesky/Twitter