Herbarium

By Jennifer Saunders

Happy National Poetry Month! We are honored to bring you poems from a special project, “Poetry in Bloom,” a collaboration with O, Miami Poetry Festival, poets Sandra Beasley and Neil de la Flor, and Dolly’s Florist. For all of April, these poems about flowers are being folded into origami and sent out with bouquets from Dolly’s. They also appear on O, Miami and on SWWIM in a variety of accessible ways, including audio, ALT text, and more.

---

	Bern, Switzerland

There are poppies in the wheat field 
            and my son has to dig one up, roots and all,
                        to add to his herbarium for biology class;

and I have fifty-two hundred Swiss Francs
            in my Fight-or-Flight envelope, 
                        a habit of hoarding unbroken since childhood 

(and which I’m sure says more about me 
            than I care to know), though at the moment 
                        there is nowhere to go.

The borders are closed in every direction
            and how can I fight what I can’t see,
                        what clots and thickens the blood?

Thirty limp flowers on my balcony—
            forget-me-nots, crocuses, snowbells—
                        laid out and labeled on white paper, 

photographed and filed 
            then left to shrivel in the sun.
                        My passport is set to expire 

before the US Embassy reopens 
            for citizen services 
                        and I have never felt so trapped.
	
This flower project is an easy A 
            (which he really needs), 
                        so each time I return from the woods 
	
I tell him which blossoms I saw 
            and off he goes: little grim reaper, 
                        trowel in hand.

I feel bad about the flowers, but it’s a long list, 
            and he needs to kill one of each 
                        if he wants to pass. 

---

Jennifer Saunders (she/hers) is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019). Her poem, “Crosswalk,” won the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition and was published in Southword. Jennifer is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Orison Anthology nominee and her work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.

---

**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile phone and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.