Herbarium

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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            Bern, Switzerland

 

There are poppies in the wheat field 
and my son has to dig one up, roots and all,
to add to his herbarium for biology class;

and I have fifty-two hundred Swiss Francs
in my Fight-or-Flight envelope, 
a habit of hoarding unbroken since childhood 

(and which I’m sure says more about me 
than I care to know), though at the moment 
there is nowhere to go.

The borders are closed in every direction
and how can I fight what I can’t see,
what clots and thickens the blood?

Thirty limp flowers on my balcony—
forget-me-nots, crocuses, snowbells—
laid out and labeled on white paper, 

photographed and filed 
then left to shrivel in the sun.
My passport is set to expire 

before the US Embassy reopens 
for citizen services 
and I have never felt so trapped.

This flower project is an easy A 
(which he really needs), 
so each time I return from the woods 

I tell him which blossoms I saw 
and off he goes: little grim reaper, 
trowel in hand.

I feel bad about the flowers, but it’s a long list, 
and he needs to kill one of each 
if he wants to pass. 

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Jennifer Saunders (she/hers) is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019). Her poem “Crosswalk” won the 2020 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition and was published in Southword. Jennifer is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Orison Anthology nominee and her work has appeared in Cotton Xenomorph, The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.