Chicory Will Get It Done

Someday —

when the humans are all gone

Nature will take it all back.

Someday —

I’ll come back as a weed —

like that pretty, blue Chicory —

and I’ll bust up a parking lot

for fun.

I love Chicory—that blue is my favorite color, not Crayola blue—periwinkle, only bluer. (Periwinkle is blue but sort of lavender at the same time.) Chicory is its own special blue. When I was a kid, I loved picking flowers for my mom, and Chicory was stubborn. That stem was too tough to pick by hand without mangling the whole plant in the process. You really needed scissors to pick Chicory. (Queen Ann’s lace is the same way; the two make a fine bouquet along with Black-Eyed Susan’s, that is if you have scissors with you for cutting them.) Chicory is a bit of a badass weed, it shows up in cracks in the pavement, sidewalks, dusty roadside shoulders, and ditches. It mixes in the backyard grass; even after being mowed over, the yard is dotted with its blue persistence. Chicory came up in a Facebook conversation about the end of humanity, in which I said, joking, “I’d come back in my next existence as Chicory and bust up a parking lot for fun.” I liked it so much that I wrote it down and kept it as part of my collection of words that I call “Poe-umms” because I’m not a poet and I know it—yet—I persist to write skinny columns of words. Some are wisdom fed, some are harsh realities, and some are absolutely ridiculous on purpose.