Stopping at the Florist Before a National Protest
Lilies, pale purple tulips split open. I’m struck, the world past the point of bud. A spray of ferns when I enter the shop, the street outside dug up, orange cones of chaos. I want to say oasis, solace, not think about how things end. I don’t know what’s in store for my kind. Nightmare, root rot, a silence in the veins? It’s inevitable: whatever fills up this vase will fade.
Whatever fills up this vase will fade. Is it inevitable? Silence in the veins, nightmare, root rot? I don’t know what’s in store for my kind if we don’t think about how things end. I want to say oasis, solace, forget the orange cones of chaos. The street outside is dug up. When I enter the shop, a spray of ferns, the world past the point of bud. I’m struck, Lilies, pale purple tulips split open.
The MacGuffin, Spring 2026
During a Traditional Holiday Meal
This poem's lines are long — turn your phone sideways to read them as written.
Once I looked up the definition of pleasantries: fresh-cut leaves filling one’s mouth, a bubble’s iridescence let go into air. Anything else and this ceiling would crack, a small shudder from your gravy boat. Sister, I liked it better when you were mad. I liked you better. Your edge exact, the line in a map when a country comes to an end. I’m no good at pretending to be close. Tonight, your dog, Lola, is the only creature to touch my hand. It’s true, our mother died. You decided I’d been the one more loved, daylight descending on my skin and staying. You wanted to be one of her birds, bright-breasted, an unmistakable crest, anything to make yourself pop into foreground and focus. Tonight, I blink against the lights you’ve strung around your window, their on-again, off-again glow. It was me our mother called the day before her heart tumbled to a stop, me. Tonight, there’s nothing to save, gristle scraped into a bin. If I spotted you years from now on a boulevard, its trees just beginning to bud, I’d know your gait, long and determined, bangles rippling your wrist. Sister, I’d slow down in the shade, a knee-length dress, my shoulders bare. Not showy, I promise. Quiet as a dandelion, but there.
Sequestrum, 2025
Talking to Children after all the Bees are Gone
How will we tell them about the air, its hum fringing ceanothus in spring,
the sleeveless path we followed as if apprenticed to every season we walked into?
When we quiet them and their faces tilt like the moon towards us, how will we
convince them translucent = wing? A photo? A drawing from memory of Apis mellifera?
How to make real the worker bee’s waggle dance, the distance before lavender
is reached, its odor astir on the antennae? Who’s to say our children won’t clamor
for a compound eye, 6500 facets to imbibe the world from above, below, to the side?
Our daughters and sons demand the fantastic— sticky pads at the end of each leg so window glass
can be climbed, the underside of a slide. Their bodies believe in us,
small boned, able to collapse against our chests. We unpucker a sock, glue stars
to their ceilings hoping to disguise the holes we’ve left in the sky.
We’re practiced in the past tense—how pollen was combed into the corbicula. Again,
they insist, not yet asleep, their eyelids uncrusted, that story again.
Canary, Fall 2024
