MARGARYTA GOLOVCHENKO

In Memory of Gardens

I look for a switch to flip off
the screen of endless green that opens 
into a promised emptiness. 

Your own private 
Eden, a digital colour field perfection that is infinitely
customizable, comes with an abundance 
of pixels to smash when the inevitable end occurs.

I have been conditioned
by our current technological age 
to want things 
mobile, active, 
               existing 
for no other purpose save
my own
entertainment. 

None of the passive staring 
or contemplation of the Good Old Days —
I have no need to question this world’s
twigs/chargers/paper towel dispensers
when a new one springs up 
every few seconds, a new colour and style 
to stay in touch with the season.

My attention has waned, thinned, fleeting 
enough to rival any black-tipped butterfly 
rarity the mind might conjure. I have grown
overgrown, algae-ic, 
jaded in ways that would taint 
the stone’s cultural memory. 

These days 
when I think of gardens
it is only to envy them
their role as gathering points,
as a shelving system for the hopes
I have long let go of, the lives
I might one day live.

Instead I stand here, a creature native
to this world of glass and concrete, 
trying to imagine the swans back to life,
more concerned with naming their plastic essence
than with all the places their wings could have flown to
that I will likely never see.