Butterfly iris

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.

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Rise frothy with yellow throats open. Tease
bees over a sea of green blades.
When I moved in, bindweed had all but choked
them. It took years, but now they’ve spread to form a thick fence.
What could be saved.

Sometimes, I say I need a nap. I cry instead.
I want to show someone the salad bowl
lettuce mix, how tall the basil. It’s a good year for the garden.
Blue and purple potatoes, what you might have done with them.

I think of our first kiss—you pressed me against your truck,
bodies twined like vines.
I was so sure I forgot to worry.
If I could, I would choke the weed before it rooted.

Tilt my head back, surrender my throat and open
farther until there is nowhere else to go but into
the bright resilience of sorrow.

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Natalie Taylor is the author of the poetry chapbook, Eden’s Edge, and her work has been published in 15 Bytes, Hubbub, Hunger Mountain, Kettle Blue Review, New Ohio Review, Rock & Sling, and The Talking River. Her poem, “You Don’t Need Shoes. You’re Not That Kind of Man,” published in Hubbub, was a co-winner of the 2020 Stout Award. She won first place in the 2016 Utah Original Writing competition and was named a 2017 Mari Sandoz Emerging Writer: Poetry.