The Plague Year, Remembered

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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As quarantine stripped days of difference,
the clocks I used to measure time were flowers
in bloom along Schurz Park’s wrought iron fence.
In May: wild leeks, their purple puffballs fierce
apostles of the creed of symmetries,
evangelizing to the tramped brown grass
from gangly leafless stems’ mad apices.
In June: rose campion, whose florid face
and white nipped nose were brazenly compelling,
as when some snappish grandma on the train
jabs at you with the tip of her umbrella.
July: the tiger lily, sex-starved, tan
legs bare beneath her upblown spotted skirt.
When fall came, okra’s pale pleats blessed the earth.

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Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Her poems appear in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch. She lives and works as a physician in New York City.