American Mandrake

Poetry by Majda Gama | From Issue 27 (Summer 2024)

The woodland bed I go to
My mother had filled with sweet woodruff—
It formed a layer so thick our Lady cat
Slept in it, upheld by the stalks called bedstraw—
Now that my mother bends to the ground no more
I have stripped it to bare dirt—my dark 
Earth, empty to the eye, rich as the grave.  
Gnarled roots of mayapple have soaked for days
Outdoor in shallow water, turned by a gloved 
Hand to avoid passing poison to my cat—
Lady passed from us and then the woodruff died—
The roots move softly in their own orbits as they swell. 
I wait for the sign. To plant them when a pearl-bead
Appears on the jointed root. They could die
If I do this wrong. Into earth I dig shallowly & long
Lay the mayapple down to sleep & cover it over
With thick dirt moved by a bright trowel—
Until the milk-tipped body disappears—
Like a bead of semen swept away by a spent hand.

Majda Gama (She/Her/Hers)

Majda Gama’s poems have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, where she is a 2024 Gregory Djanikian scholar, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, where she is the recipient of the Graybeal Gowen prize for Virginia poets, and We Call to the Eye and to the Night (Persea Press), an anthology of love poems by Arab Anglophone poets.

Author Note:

“American Mandrake” was written by hand in 2022 as an attempt to explore my bond with plants indigenous to the part of North America I live in. The ephemeral mayapple has a colonial common name, given for the rhizomatic shape of its roots and their resemblance to that of the alchemical plant from the “old world.” Without appropriating lore that isn’t my own, I counted syllables, played with symbols of alchemy, em dashes, and Anglo-Saxon language to build a tonal “folk horror” poem that could be from an earlier time/tome. The poem concludes with the plant’s readiness to be planted.