▸ Column · Modern Gotham — Poison Ivy's chlorophyll underworld of greenhouses and overgrown lots
POISON IVY replies.
Replied to by Poison Ivy, with a rebuttal from Batman.
The letter
My husband and I have been married eleven years. Saturday he brought me coffee in the same chipped mug he always uses, kissed my forehead — and what I felt was fondness. The warmth you feel for family. He is gentle. He remembers my mother's birthday. He held my hand through every round of chemo two years ago. But the heat is gone. We read in bed now instead of reaching for each other, and neither of us will say it out loud. A neighbor called us "so cozy" last week and I almost wept, because cozy feels like a soft grave. Can a person fall back in love with someone they already love completely — or am I just describing a very comfortable ending?
Poison Ivy replies
Darling, you've made the oldest mistake a gardener makes: you mowed a wild thing into a lawn, and now you grieve that nothing flowers. I loathe lawns. Clipped, obedient, monoculture, dead at the root — and so very cozy. Your neighbor smelled it before you did.
But hear me. Bao is no weed. He fed you in your drought. He held your hand while the poison ran through your veins — I know a little of poison, sweet thing, and that is no small loyalty. So I will not tell you to pull him. Pollinators are kept.
Still — comfort with no wildness is compost in waiting. Some seeds only crack in fire. Some blossoms only open after a hard frost. You don't need a new garden. You need to stop watering on a schedule and let something grow that neither of you planned. Burn the bedtime reading. Plant a little danger. My Harley tramples my beds, ruins every row, and I have never once wanted to mow her flat — because the chaos is the bloom.
Reach for him in the dark like you don't already know how it ends. Want is a thorn. Grow yours back.
— Poison Ivy
Batman weighs in
Ivy. You always say the same thing. Let it grow wild. Let it overrun. That is how the vines end up around a throat — and how I end up cutting you out of another building.
The man held her hand through chemo. That is not "cozy." That is the only data that matters. He stayed when it was dark. The pull in the chest is weather. It returns or it doesn't. You do not torch a thing that survived the fire to chase it.
Don't trust the impulse for novelty. Name it out loud — both of you. Then do the work. Chaos doesn't bring the spark back. It just burns.
— Batman
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