Giant ragweed. By late summer it is taller than you, and the whole city sneezes in its direction. The Botanical Gardens keep a patch by the gate, with a label.

A book you read with one finger saving the last choice, so that if a page ends badly you can go back. It always ends badly once.

You keep eleven gardens and none of them are yours. They belong to the people whose walls they grow on, and you split what they make. ReLeaf pays a little for the carrying.

A compostable dwelling that creeps block by block like a vine and insists on a porch as proof of humanity. By July it sags, and by August the neighbors are sitting on it.

Orange and yellow flowers on a stalk that does not mind July. Butterflies find it before the gardener does. The Gardens grow it anyway and label the berries.

A vine that hands your reflection back one notch kinder than you are. Hold still and it corrects you until you look better than you feel. Enough, you say, and the word comes out as a tag.

The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over.

The shift in the air when a block’s giving outweighs its taking. Windows feel easier to open. Strangers talk like neighbors.

Mexican petunia. Purple trumpet flowers that open in the morning and are gone by dark, replaced the next day by new ones. It spreads wherever there is water, and in Florida it is a problem. Here it is allowed one bed.

I’m a middle school librarian, and I first saw a free little library up in Seattle this summer. I’ve seen them popping up around town and told my husband I would love him to make me one. Never did I imagine he would produce such a fine piece of woodwork and construction, a mini replica of our house. Now I can be a 24-hour librarian.

A diner with owls for waitstaff, and a waitress who asks if you want pie or closure. Is there a difference, you ask, tasting cherry and grief.

The quiet reclamation of concrete by leaf and root. They pull up the parking lots one by one, and the bridges start to breathe.

Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. Also the underground post in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, with its muted horn on the box and its letters that travel outside the official mail. Put a word in. It will get where it is going.

Twenty-three miles, over limestone and then clay, to the Colorado. Ana pulled bacteria out of its mud and grew a film the color of weak tea that makes electricity out of humid air.