Sarah Hall
Mistrust Certain Flowers
Mistrust Certain Flowers.
An artist has aerosolled this
high along the Death-Star corridors of New York.
Perhaps this is when she began thinking of him,
because of how he would say it,
soft loud soft,
not what it meant or did not mean.
Her tongue is swollen wood,
an old door.
She practices his name out loud,
behind the coffee machine.
Unaccustomed to its shape
the air holds it,
an insect set in honey.
Sometimes she tries to wear his name
over her shoulders.
Behind the blue citadel
fat rain cracks on his suede jacket.
One night after drinking
she lays dry timbers in the cellar of her language.
He’s sleeping when she trails the powder.
He buckles,
like someone has set a defibrillator
square on his chest,
then starts breathing again.
The voltage distracts her. She has only one lit match.
Maybe it was whiplash
that brought him back,
over pyramids, parmesan triangles,
weightless and with clouds pooling below,
into the cold.
About this meeting,
there is more electricity in temporary rooms,
city streets,
like dry leaves in an anti-cyclone,
hot petals passing under the skin.
Page(s) 85-86
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