Doug Roy, Turtle, Cut Paper
Dandelion Patrol *
New house, new dandelions. Hairy, savage dandelions,
ancient and venerable, like a Galapagos tortoise
or one of Tolkien’s Dwarvish kings.
New to this suburban purgatory, I succumb
immediately to peer pressure, and resentfully.
If dandelions were delicate and rare, we would treasure
them and coddle them and gnash our teeth when they slipped
through our fingers.
Dandelions laugh when they see me coming.
Their taproots take evasive action; they grow new crowns
like the Hydra.
If rare orchids kept springing up
in our lawns, we would poison them and pull them up and hate them.
I keep uprooting dandelions through back pain
for the satisfaction of killing.
*Previously published in Brian Jerrold Koester’s new collection, Why the Trumpet Is Blue (Silver Bow Publishing, 2026)
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Brian Jerrold Koester
Review by Ben Sloan
To think about poisoning, pulling up, and hating orchids should they appear, uninvited, in large numbers on our lawns, as dandelions currently do, is a good way to nudge readers to rethink and reposition their perspective on everything, really, just with this one turn of the dial. As the poem suggests, this pursuit of “savage dandelions” is really a result of peer pressure–the fact that everyone else in the neighborhood, or so it seems, believes, who knows why, we need to give ourselves the satisfaction of killing them, these gentle yellow-crowned plants. How many other experiences do we leap into without stopping to ask ourselves: Why am I doing this? Is there really any point to these rituals, habits, enterprises I/we take for granted?
Having read and enjoyed this poem, now every time I see a dandelion I will think of it as the equivalent of Tolkien’s dwarfish kings.