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I plant runner beans on the eighth floor

It strikes me this is the kind of kindness
you would do to someone else’s body.
One month later, lung-shaped leaves have green-stretched

and orange-scattershot themselves across
the balcony, panting with coiled pleasure
in thirty degrees, carbon dioxide-

drunk. Meanwhile, I have questions I don’t ask.
Will we sink or swim. That’s not a question.
Will we get better, pink-lunged long haulers,

Lions Gate Hospital across the street.
Those aren’t questions. I have other questions
concerning clots and lightyears, concerning

clouds and breathing underwater. I don’t
ask them. I blame the weather, sirens, fire
seasons, the cucumbers and pink sea stars

refrigerating twenty-six meters
down, for making me think of what you’d do,
kindness or not, to someone’s body. You’d

bring it water and wipe off the little
aphids. Dead or alive, you’d dab dish soap
behind the body’s ears, more a message

than a blessing, dust the shoots with cayenne
pepper. Pretty please, you’d tell them, don’t come
back. And in this way, wouldn’t you be kind?

Wouldn’t you? Won’t we? Don’t you have questions,
coiled like kindness, that you’re afraid to ask?
Dead or alive, could I count these questions

out like white dwarf stars or satellites, point
out the hospital, mid-delta wave, across
the street? The hospital suggests we try,

like we were counting shoots and runner beans,
the bamboo trellis, the new images
from the James Webb Telescope. It says, try

creeping up this way, twisting north-north-east
like dying nebulae. You’d agree. You’d
try the zeroes, the sleeping cat’s pink toes,

trace the heatwave creeping east. You’d do it
this kindness, make much of it, showing it
the distance, all the ways that we could go.

Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created the graphic novel One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and currently resides in North Vancouver BC.