flowers for angela

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Emma Paris

She sits like an earthquake in the sky, more vibrant than any bones of ours.

I think that we’re all dying.

We’re all connected, but today I’m too fragile to see.

I’m standing neck deep in a pool and that pool is the grief of my community. We lined the whole street with vases but it rained and they all overflowed: calendula, marigolds, daisies rolled down the street. The feathery petals guided, as if by her hand, toward salvation.

We found them, flushed and salty, in the strainer of the gutter, all of them reversing inside of me, turning the ring of my belly into a weeping garden. I thought I would carry this sorrow in a water skin and instead I am swimming across it and I am always halfway.