Lili squats on a sunken plank,
packing oak leaves around the crumbling fern,
snipping spearmint to jar air
for our secondhand Honda. Her hair
slips over her shoulder and tumbles into the soil.
Husks of doghouse hay bale skitter over the porch,
latching onto my shoelaces. Mist, therefore,
the province of her birth,
rice noodle rain and green mountains,
the province of gardens and graves, moisturises
the cracked-chrysalis leaves
of Missouri.