Sweetbay

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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—Magnolia Virginiana at the corner of 23rd and Stanton


Stooped like a teenager,
shaped like a
question mark.

Not luscious like your cousins—
full-bodied confections
bursting, blowsy Marilyns—

No. Skinny—with once white petals
just past dirty now—but I am not
coming to see you.

I make my way 
with eyes closed.
Rounding the bend,

inhaling, you take the pain away.
Out from my neck, jaw,
and shoulders.

Drunk, I wonder how many
other passing noses have peeled
back their masks,

thrust themselves into
your low-hanging cups,
and I don’t even care.

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Amy Baskin's work has been featured in SWWIM Every Day, Stone Gathering, and Verseweavers, and is forthcoming in Pirene's Fountain. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, and an Oregon Poetry Association prize winner. When she's not writing, she matches international students at Lewis & Clark College with local residents to help them feel welcome and at home during their time in Oregon.