I Read Sad Poems to My Houseplants
The fern thrives on heartbreak; the cactus prefers limericks.
My fern has heard more heartbreak poetry than any human being alive, and I am prepared to argue she has taste. Her name is Brenda, she lives on the bookshelf by the window, and she doubled in size the winter my life fell apart.
Some context. Two years ago I moved to a city where I knew exactly one person, and then, after a rainy Tuesday in October, exactly zero. The breakup itself was unremarkable, as breakups go. He was kind about it, which is somehow worse. What was remarkable was the apartment afterward: four hundred square feet that suddenly had an echo, a radiator that clanked like a ghost learning drums, and me, saying maybe eleven words out loud per day, most of them to a barista.
The plants were an accident. The woman at the plant shop on the corner had a going out of business sale and a persuasive manner, and I left with a fern, a cactus, and a pothos the way some people leave casinos with less money and no memory of deciding anything. As she bagged them she said, “Talk to them. Carbon dioxide. They like it.”
So I talked to them... It felt insane. “How are we doing today, everyone,” I would say, in the bright doomed voice of a substitute teacher. The plants said nothing, which, fair.
Then one evening in November I was holding a draft of a poem I had written about the airport, about the specific gate where I had hugged someone goodbye without knowing it was the last one, and instead of reading it silently for the fortieth time, I read it out loud. To the fern.
And here is the thing nobody tells you: it is easier to read a poem to a fern than to a person, because a fern will never ask who it is about.
By December I had a nightly reading series with an audience of three. Attendance was excellent, since none of them could leave. And over the weeks, I swear on the potting soil, they developed preferences. Brenda the fern thrives on heartbreak. The sadder the poem, the greener she gets; during my darkest week in January she produced four new fronds, which felt frankly exploitative. Gerald the cactus is unmoved by free verse but seems to respond to limericks. I cannot prove this scientifically. I can only tell you that he did not die, and for the things in my care that winter, not dying counted as a standing ovation.
Susan the pothos remains indifferent to everything. Susan has heard my best work and given me nothing. Every reading series needs one critic.
People ask about quirky writer routines like this is charming, and fine, it is a little charming. But I want to be honest about what it actually was.
It was a voice with nowhere to go. Every poem I read that winter was secretly about the loneliness, even the limericks. Especially the limericks. You do not read verse to a cactus at 7 p.m. on a Friday because your social calendar is thriving. You do it because the human throat needs somewhere to put itself, and the rain is on the window, and the fern, at least, is leaning your way.
The ritual got specific, the way rituals do. Seven o'clock. Watering can first, so the room smelled like wet soil, which is the closest smell we have to the word begin. Radiator clanking through the second stanza. Rain on the glass doing the audio engineering. Me, standing in socks in the middle of my own small life, reading to three plants like the last poet on earth.
Then, one Tuesday in February, a piece of paper slid under my door.
I want to describe my heart rate accurately here and I cannot. The note was written on the back of a takeout menu, in blue pen, and it said: “I can hear you through the wall. Please don't stop. The one about the airport made me cry, which is annoying, because I was making dinner.”
No name... No apartment number. Just the wall we shared, suddenly load-bearing in a whole new way.
I did the only reasonable thing, which was to sit on the floor and mentally audit every single poem I had performed at full volume for three months. The one where I did voices. The one with the word naked in it. The one where I stopped in the middle and said, out loud, to a fern, “Brenda, be honest, is this garbage?”
A stranger had heard all of it.
A stranger had heard me ask a houseplant for editorial feedback.
And underneath the mortification, something else... slower and warmer: a stranger had heard the airport poem, the truest thing I had ever written, and it had landed. In a kitchen. On a weeknight. Poetry had gone through a wall and interrupted someone's dinner.
I wrote back on the front of the same takeout menu and taped it to their door: “Thank you. Any requests?”
The reply came the next evening, under my door: “Something with hope in it. It's been a year.”
It's been a year.
Four words, no explanation, and suddenly the wall between our apartments was just a piece of drywall between two people carrying their own private weather. I never found out a year since what. I didn't need to. Everyone's year is a year.
The problem was inventory. I did not own a poem with hope in it. My entire catalog was grief with jokes on top. So I spent that week reading through poems about hope the way you look through a stranger's medicine cabinet: not to steal anything, just to see how other people treat the condition. Then I sat down and wrote one. It took six drafts. Hope, it turns out, is harder to write than despair, because despair only has to be accurate and hope has to be earned.
That Friday at seven I watered everyone, and then I turned, for the first time, away from the fern and toward the wall, and I read it a little louder than usual. Brenda forgave the change of staging. When I finished there was a long silence... and then two knocks on the wall. Gentle ones. Applause, reduced to its smallest possible form.
Loneliness is just a voice with nowhere to put itself, and a fern, it turns out, is somewhere.
We have never met, my neighbor and I. I have decided this is on purpose, a small mercy we extend each other. Some audiences are better as two knocks and a takeout menu. But the wall changed my math about strangers, so in the spring I posted the airport poem on a community wall for poets, where people who were not ferns said things back, specific things, kind things. One of them had cried while making dinner too. There are apparently kitchens full of us. Later I entered the hope poem into a monthly poetry contest, because if it could get through drywall, I figured it could survive a judge.
The loneliness did not vanish. That is not how it works and I will not pretend otherwise. But it changed shape, from a sealed room into something with a mail slot.
It is April now. The rain on the window has turned friendly. Brenda is unfurling a new frond, slowly, the way a fist relaxes. At seven o'clock I read to the fern, the cactus, the pothos, and the wall, in that order, and when I land the last line I wait... and it comes: two knocks, every time.
We are all doing so much better than we sound.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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