Today the sun shines
like a colleague, rather than a friend.
On my walk to the drugstore, no one
smiles at the sidewalk, happy to be happy
on a Tuesday afternoon. The cosmetics aisle
is out of every nail polish except beige,
greige, and blah; the florist has just sold
the last daffodils to someone who couldn’t possibly
need them like I do. My parents almost named me
Dearest Darling Daffodil, but instead
they chose Anne, and I’ve been staving
off dullness ever since, wielding blossoms
like crucifixes against vast mouths of nothing
that strive to swallow me senseless.

The sun clocks out without saying
goodbye. For my final errand, I stop
at the witch’s hut, pick up the special brew
I ordered. It smells like something a worm
might find enticing. She claims it will turn me
into the flower I was meant to be, so I toss it back
and sit in the grass. I’ll give it till the morning.

Once, in a hotel bathtub, I wrote a poem
about storms at sea, ships shattering
their spines against steel waves.
There was a kraken in the mix,
slick arms thickly coiling, caressing
each sailor before sending them a’hurl.
It was a poem about my life, I assumed,
like the one I wrote

on my seventeenth birthday, about ghosts
that danced their shadows down
stairwell walls, which I deemed
funny, because my life was funny,
the way an “accidental” toaster
in the bathtub is funny –

Really, I thought my life

was hard. That, at its least dramatic,
it was a gritty, gravel-scratched knee.
Or the dry socket I got
after my wisdom tooth extraction,
because I didn’t follow doctor’s orders
and sneezed. My jawbone flashed
the sclera of some awful eye.
Last week, I wrote a poem about

magma. What do I know about magma,
except that it’s hot gunk in the ground?
My life has nothing to do with magma,
or the rust on ax blades, or how people get lost
in woods at night. I’ll stick to what I know –
what do I know? My mom texts me a picture

of her kitten-scratched arm. The daintiness of it,
the sting. Really, it all comes down
to flowers, and I’m not suggesting
that’s some wonderful thing. Like waiting
for a corpse to decompose, healing is repulsive.
But something must turn to mush to feed, to fatten,
the flowers flowers flowers.