BABETTE CIESKOWSKI is the author of the poetry chapbook "Secrets My Body Keeps" (dancing girl press, 2022). She was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2020 & 2024. Her poems have appeared in Zone 3, Frontier Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Juked, and The Laurel Review, among others. Born in Oahu, Hawaii, she has lived in South Florida, Kitzingen, Germany, and Central Texas. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio where she works with The Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project (OPEEP). Grounded in prison abolition, OPEEP works to increase access to higher education for incarcerated individuals within Ohio prisons.
In the garden of addiction, I am home.
I tend to her like a spoiled child.
Like a spoiled child, I want everything.
Unrestrained, I give nothing in return.
Unrestrained, giving nothing, I’m invasive—
tree-of-heaven swallowing the garden whole.
I swallow heaven’s only garden whole,
my womb an echo of honeysuckle.
My womb’s an echo I’ve named honeysuckle.
Even an emptiness needs a name.
My emptiness has more than one given name.
It bends and grins towards each of my callings.
I bend and grin toward every calling
in the garden of addiction I call home.
Volume 15.1, winter 25
Babette Cieskowski
