Starting a Compost Pile

by

Vivian Wagner

I squared off an area with
old birch logs, dug up moss
down to sand and rocks,
added juiced carrot
pulp and onion tops, and
covered them with fallen
yellow leaves and the scraggly
bodies of weeds we pulled
earlier in the summer.
It seems important, now,
to do this, in the second
half of my life, when everything
needs to be made into something
else, including me, including
the old journal pages that
I will tear up because they,
too, are brown matter that
will be lost for gain.

Vivian Wagner’s work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Gone Lawn, The Atlantic, Narratively, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Bending Genres, and other publications. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington); a full-length poetry collection, Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House); and four poetry chapbooks: The Village (Aldrich Press-Kelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), Curiosities (Unsolicited Press), and Spells of the Apocalypse (Thirty West Publishing House).