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.
Not fruit, but inverted flower, like you, the female fig blooms inside the pod. Your belly grows rounder. Breasts already less your own. The male figs stay inedible as wasps burrow, lay their eggs inside before dying. Your weekly updates tell you the baby can now open and close its seed-sized fists. At night you think you feel it, the squeeze-release, then reach into your mouth and pull out grains of dentin or enamel from holding shut too tight. You have your father's mouth. His rotting teeth. If a wasp found herself inside a female fig—a common error among ripeness, hard to tell the sex of skin—she would starve, exoskeleton devoured by the fig’s ficin, absorbed into the fruit-flower’s flesh. In your grandmother's Odessa orchard, your father would bite into males and females indiscriminately, spit out what tasted foul, wings or venom, just born male wasps, blind and tunneling their way out into autumn light.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019); Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, written while pregnant with daughter (forthcoming from YesYes Books, 2023). Her recent poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Her work has been selected for Best New Poets, the Williams Carlos Williams University Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and New South’s Poetry Prize. Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two kids, two cats, one dog, and one husband.
**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.