Flower Girl
- Flower Girl
1
She had wanted to be onehad always been one
girl with the yellow chingirl who’d swooshed the buttercup
You must like butter you mustcrocus tulip forsythia
on the teacher’s desk inching outgoogolplex subset
lily of the valley fistfulfor the hell of it for the smell of it
and dandelions too theirmonstrous taproots defying
the spade though mother insistedshe’d won that weedy war
2
Regarded from a distancewith relative disinterest
then the special microscopefor carpels and locules
for epigenous versus hypogenousShe didn’t think she would swim would
swim through the weekly quizzeswould she know for instance the tell-tale [End Page 135]
signs of ranunculus tricky as allcolumbine and larkspur
He her professor told them tobaccoa pink trumpet cashew related
to poison ivy it was all so newit was all so not urban New Jersey
where she’d languished fifteen yearsnot knowing the phallic green finger
was a pulpit not seeing the springbeauty though always loved the up
between patio cracks portulaca pink and yellowlike the Easter Bunny hid them the night before
3
We’ll be on the ground shortly but she didn’twant to jettison us forward
past the mainland toward Hawaiiwhere monodelphous hibiscus
scarletly rules that one fused stamencheesy with pollen that in a musty Iowa lab
she stuck beneath a dissecting scope the better tomaybe I should drop like a drupe from a prickly stem
maybe she couldn’t go this far past azaleawhere a rose was not a rose but a tiny white bloom
lacking scent Climbed to the topof Mount Kinabalu scrambled up to see
the world’s largest Rafflesia ruddy with donut diskpronged like the suctioned feet of starfish [End Page 136]
wholly parasitic wholly making a livingoff the vines of Tetrastigma
in the same way she had spread her haustoriuminto mock orange honeysuckle lilac [End Page 137]
Martha Silano is the author of four books of poetry, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia, 2014). She is also coeditor, with Kelli Russell Agodon, of The Daily Poet: Day-to-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Martha serves as poetry editor of Crab Creek Review and teaches at Bellevue College.
