The World Behind CVS
Belmont, MA
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
The world behind the CVS
is a different kind of quiet.
Not woods-quiet, which is full of bugs and wind,
but a held-breath quiet,
heavy with the hum of air conditioners
and the smell of hot asphalt.
This is where I wait for my ride,
on the curb that’s stained with something dark.
The sun cooks the top of my head.
There’s nothing to look at but the brick wall,
the dented green dumpster,
and the lines for parking spaces, faded and cracked.
Except, that’s not true.
There’s a dandelion, for one.
Not a whole field of them, just one,
punched up through a fissure in the pavement
like a fist.
Its yellow is so bright it hurts to look at,
a tiny, stubborn sun against the gray.
And if you look closer,
the whole cracked map of the lot
is a river system for ants.
A civilization of them, carrying microscopic burdens
from the dumpster to a kingdom
somewhere under the concrete slab I’m sitting on.
Moss, the color of a forgotten sweater,
grows in the sliver of permanent shade
by the wall. It’s damp there, even now.
You could press your finger into it
and feel the give.
I used to think this wasn’t real nature.
Nature was a field trip to a reservation,
a documentary with a British narrator,
a place you had to drive to.
It was supposed to be clean, and grand,
and separate.
But the starlings on the power line,
chattering and clicking, don’t know this is a parking lot.
The weed, whose name I don’t know,
that’s prying open the curb with its roots,
doesn’t know it’s not supposed to grow here.
They are the ecosystem of ignored places.
The ecology of asphalt and exhaust.
Their roots don’t need a forest floor.
Their nests can be built in the letter ‘C’ on a sign.
My ride pulls up, a bubble of air conditioning and pop music.
And for a second, I don’t want to go.
I want to stay here, in the heat,
in the quiet hum,
and watch this tough, scrappy world
that is refusing, with everything it has,
to be paved over.
Reflection
I used to think you had to go somewhere special to connect with nature—a forest, a lake, far out of the city. I live in a suburb where if someone came to look for nature, all they would find are well-manicured lawns. The natural world felt very separate from my everyday life. But the more I looked, the more I realized how resilient nature is; it has an incredible ability to continuously refuse to be paved over. I saw it in the weeds prying open the sidewalk, the moss growing in the shade that a wall created, and most of all in the dandelion that I did really see behind our local CVS. Even though I'm new to it, poetry felt like the best means to convey that discovery, and it helped me connect to the world creatively. It isn't a loud or dramatic story; it's about the quiet shift that occurs when you just start paying more attention. My poem is about realizing the concrete jungle is more of a jungle than we think. My message is that nature isn't just in the places that we conserve and restrict to being for nature. It is in the ignored, forgotten corners of the world fighting for its own place. That is the true beauty of nature in my eyes, and to truly see it, we must look down.