She fumbles through
a decade making sculptures
from leftover cardboard cores
(exposed when the toilet paper rolls
run out) with empty flax seed bags
tucked inside them.

Sometimes ground. Sometimes whole.
Sometimes the seeds themselves
become part of the piece.

Predating pandemic solitude,
sunshine would filter through
half open venetian blinds.
She would configure and reconfigure
her found materials
into premonitions

about what the day outside might hold.
Rarely repeating the form
or ink she used to write the words

that would become the glue
to hold it all together.
Always invisible—
mostly sympathetic. Messages
only oak galls can whisper.
Only a little blue vitriol can decode.

And the tallest trees
in urban pocket parks
would bend and moan.

Every poem ever written
is a form
of steganography.