flower – other animals

Sonnet

with false starts buzzing around my head what do I do do I recall one fly I cut in half with a glass while trying to trap and free it—then sculpt some little line to be stomped bloodless by the sound of boots on the ceiling—so do I then try to persist with this misty I and words like persist—but to speak plainly there is no window in which to speak plainly about a small flower past my boots that I wish could fly into colors that open a window into a land where I could lie…

but now I’m cut in half and half of me
may persist and maybe that I will fly

broken pen in my eye. The flower she ran away with

I tried to be two things but the paper kept curling and I couldn’t get a straight line so I decided to move to the next town where I met someone who reminded me of a girl I once knew whose name I never learned as we only ever joked about certain forbidden vegetables while we were in school together though it was more of a forced labor camp but when those ghostly blue flowers came again in the spring we were allowed a minute of silence to think of the photos we once had pinned up by our cots now long eaten by moths

laughing in a shower little red mouths of chestnut flowers

white flowers underground what mask to wear today

rewriting the sympathy card the silence of oak flowers

beneath the flowering cherry my future hidden in the roots

the pain in my back and notebook all for this little white flower