Greenery overlapping in Khairani Barokka's back garden in Jakarta. Courtesy of poet.
because do calls this house an ecosystem
where straddling folioles tangle mighty-fisted
along a wire canopy he strung
above the brick-and-pot garden, and city fox
coming like a client for bananas they feed it sunny
and rats on rare occasion, ‘because this is an ecosystem’,
while i’d lie, wide-eyed for a tail out the window
and up there explosions of birdstrain, as though not far there isn’t
vast crackling chemical dust in convoys of exhaust
and here where industrious mosquitoes venture against
the pop! of electric tennis racket and worm eggs
are down-the-drained with soap and warm water
that comes from a tap (unlike when i was small,
and we were servants to boiling for safety,
enjoying waves of wait, billowing slower breaths into ease)
and there by your room the aloe row that mo
breaks open with reverence to soften her hair
and when i was small, when you were a baby,
we’d wait for baygon to be sprayed in each room
and would open the doors and sniff, no timer
and safe to come in when the chemsmell lifted,
but now an earthy dispelling of such things
for the humans, bracts inside who mold the way
the weight of the house and its inhabitants
all prayed for, making this green
a node of the world