by Laura Johanna Braverman

I see her from the open garden-door,

the neighbor’s grand-daughter. She

descends the gravel road, stopping

by the hedgerow across the open barn,

where three cows await their labor

shaded from the mid-day sun. She

reaches in an arm, shoulder-deep –

I wait and watch – from the branches

pulls out sheets of paper, one after

another. Pictures, words, hidden code?

Her name is called, the hoard shoved

quickly back into the tangled vault.

It was not a hedgerow that housed

my secrets, but a narrow borderland

between two fences with a string

of eucalyptus trees. The ground was

layered thick with curls of peeling

bark and dry leaf-shards. I waded

through, to the end where fences met.

There, among insects, roots, the trees’

detritus, I was an initiate of the in-

between; with rocks and soil practiced

the unspoken rites until, called back

from the house, I was again a girl.

Laura Johanna Braverman, a writer and artist, is the author of Salt Water (Cosmographia Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Reliquiae, Plume, New Plains Review, and California Quarterly, among other journals. She is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at Lancaster University, and lives in Lebanon with her family.