I’m good at most things
and keeping a plant alive, sustaining life,
comes naturally,
I thought.

Plants can hang on for a long time, weeks;
you don’t know that they suffer
or how they suffer
until one day it’s too late.

It must have been
the plant, something wrong,
or something easily fixed next time:
more water, less water.

But the next time after the next time
when I reach for another, at the store,
a panic stops me, a surge of shame:
another victim is my thought.

And then I know it must have been me,
that I am not good at plants,
at sustaining life,
that it was me, all this time, all along.