Stand again naked at the open terrace doors, imagine my silhouette, glazed by the flames of my bay leaf candle, resembles the shadow of our old cathedral cactus- lumpy, grey, soft clones drooping from each arm like cellulite, a dipped torso and lean to the left, tied to a useless wooden crutch. But in the fine Tuscan daylight the cactus ripples green and muscular, and she holds thousands of pups in each of her seven thick prickled arms, her cripple, not a sign of weakness. Maybe Galileo didn’t drop a musket ball from her spines, and perhaps her fleshy stems don’t contain seven bells cast in bronze, but she was sculpted, too, by a visionary- a breeze knocks her from an arm, reborn from the soil, thousands of times for thousands of years, and she tolls not for the worship of a lurking god, but the respect of the Great Supple Mother that cradles her.

Lauren Dodge (she/her) is an emerging poet from Midwestern America. She recently moved to Tuscany with her husband and two poodles. She enjoys drinking cappuccinos, walking her dogs through medieval streets, and smelling flowers. Her work has been published in Stone Poetry Quarterly.