When you pick a flower, you risk violence to it beyond the taking. I used to try— wanting to hold a bright, rough zinnia, wanting to carry it away with me—then soon the stem bent, its fibers showing but not breaking, the leaves stripping off, the heat of my hand in the stem now, sweat and the plant’s fluids mixed, and still no flower for me— wanting it, wanting the shortcut, not to go get the scissors— I thought I loved but I was not kind. I didn’t understand the stem bends so it can survive the air— preserve the vessels that carry what it needs from the ground, from sun, even if hurt, so it might, in slow-fast plant time, repair the damage. Now, in hurricane country, watching the orange tithonia sway in before-storm wind, thinking I’ll be needing to prop them up again, I see: how the cosmos, heavy with purple buds, bent in the last torrent at the root rather than breaking, so they could reangle themselves from the ground or so I could help them upright, which I did, with bricks, with sticks and string, and though they lean, they lean toward the sky.
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. Her work is forthcoming in The Common online and Denver Quarterly, and appears in anthologies including Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene. She teaches at UNC Wilmington, where she is editor of Ecotone, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.
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