The Midnight Gardener
In dreams in which I’m an ax murderer,
I go room by room
hacking
l i m b
from
l i m b
like thwack! thwack! thwack!
I.
It began when I was a child,
an orphan without a name…
At grandma’s house, I liked to play
in the garden made of bricks.
I’d climb climb climb the little brick
wall and stick my fingers into the dirt.
I’d pull roots, I’d pull shrubs,
even flowers sometimes too.
One day, whilst digging,
I knocked one of those bricks loose.
And that’s when I spotted it, resting atop
the mortar; a slimy little snail.
At recess, the other kids said they’d seen a movie
with cartoon bugs—
the flies ordered the poo poo platter,
the snail ordered his with no salt.
I hopped out of the garden and
snuck into the kitchen…
Grandma screamed when she saw
what I had done—
Its body oozing atop the mortar,
the skin sizzling and blistered.
II.
When I was eleven,
my daddy built a wood stove.
I stacked the firewood as he swung the ax
like thwack! thwack! thwack!
One day, I found the wood
crawling with termites.
So, I grabbed the smallest log
and tossed it in the fire.
I sat there crisscross and watched
them through the windowpane—
tiny little termites
dancing in the fire
Later, when I told my best friend Billy,
he recoiled and called me all sorts of names—
bastard, orphan boy, some kind of mistake
III.
Now, I’m back to pulling weeds,
this time in the dark.
Billy built himself a house and
filled it with his f a m i l y.
In the shadow of his white colonial,
I dig my hands into the dirt;
I pull roots, I pull branches,
my fingers gouge the rhododendrons.
I’m a midnight chameleon,
an orphan without a name…
I’m the midnight gardener,
watching through your windowpane.
And in my dreams, I’m an ax murderer,
if I could only fall asleep.
Jonathan Wittmaier
Jonathan Wittmaier is a Korean American writer, educator and artist. A transracial adoptee—he was born in Seoul, South Korea and was raised in southern New Jersey. His writing has appeared in Water~Stone Review, Philadelphia Stories Magazine, Eunoia Review, the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW, The Rising Phoenix Review, VISIBLE Magazine, WordCity Literary Journal, and Weave (a zine created by PNW Kundiman). He is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Adelphi University Creative Writing Award for Dramatic Writing. He currently resides in Seattle, Washington. You can find more of his writing at jonathanwittmaier.com or follow him on IG at https://www.instagram.com/jonathanwittmaier/?hl=en
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
I hope everyone is enjoying AWP! I couldn’t make it this year due to being ~with child~ but getting to read poems from our BRAWLERS is almost making up for it.
This poem surprised me in a lot of ways. The ability to show a flawed/hurt speaker is one I think a lot of people are afraid of and/or is hard to do well. The cruelty of growing up as a child and learning how to interact with the world really struck me on my first reading of the poem. Going back into it again I was able to appreciate how the form was working to continue legacies of violence and the view of the self through these legacies. I’m semi-familiar with Jonathan’s work as well, and much of it deals with growing up as an adoptee which I read into this poem as well. (You can read more about that in the interview!!) The poem doesn’t let a reader or the speaker look away but it also allows us to see with the eyes of child which I think can be wonderful and full of grace.
And of course, the poem is visually interesting with some great sensory details (something I’m always looking for) and beyond that the speaker’s honesty is compelling. I think we need more of that in the world don’t we?
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
Since this poem is all about this child’s troubling relationship to the natural world, I figured it would be perfect for Team Taylor as she is all about that “nature crap” haha. There is also a bit of a surreal quality to this piece, especially the ending. I envisioned this as a kind of impressionist, almost hallucinatory recollection of formative moments from the speaker’s childhood—moments that are also framed by their “dreams” of being an ax murderer. What’s actually a dream vs what’s reality is left for the reader to determine.
How does this poem fit within your typical discography?
After traveling back to Korea for the first time since my adoption, I ended up writing a series of poems reflecting on my experience growing up as a transracial adoptee. Like a lot of adoptees, I didn’t come to know many others with a similar upbringing until I went to college. Up until then, all I had were the various pop culture interpretations of adoption and stereotypical orphan narratives, one of the most prevalent being the “evil orphan" horror film trope. This piece is me leaning into those tropes and doing my best to unpack and turn them on their head. For me at least, writing poems about adoption is a lot like shedding skins. You spend your whole life carrying this stuff around with you, growing into it, until one day you put it all on the page and expel it from your system. This piece just so happens to be a little darker and more violent than some of the others. But that’s what makes it even more cathartic for me, kind of like going axe throwing.
Talk to me about form in this piece, how did you approach form and how do you see the form working with the content?
I always try to let the narrative or emotion dictate form. For this poem, I started with the framing device of this “dream” and wanted to represent the splintered, piece by piece threading of sensory detail that often comes with trying to remember dreams. The main narrative itself also has certain moments that I wanted to accentuate, such as the memory within the memory of the kids at recess talking about a scene from A Bug’s Life, or the way the speaker describes the killing of the termites and what the best friend says in response.
I’m also just a big fan of poems with a lot of movement. The very act of having to trace the words across the page with your eyes in a way that dictates pace and rhythm is one of the things I love most about poetry. As someone who started out writing mostly fiction, I enjoy being able to use white space in ways that are far less restrictive than when I’m writing prose.