by Anna Lena Phillips Bell

When you pick a flower, you risk
violence to it
beyond the taking. I used to try—

wanting to hold a bright, rough zinnia,
wanting to carry it
away with me—then soon

the stem bent, its fibers
showing but not breaking, the leaves
stripping off, the heat of my hand

in the stem now, sweat and the plant’s
fluids mixed, and still no flower for me—
wanting it, wanting the shortcut,

not to go get the scissors—
I thought I loved but I was not kind.
I didn’t understand

the stem bends
so it can survive the air—
preserve the vessels

that carry what it needs
from the ground, from sun, even if hurt,
so it might, in slow-fast

plant time, repair
the damage. Now, in hurricane country,
watching the orange tithonia

sway in before-storm wind, thinking
I’ll be needing to prop them up again,
I see: how the cosmos, heavy with purple buds,

bent in the last torrent
at the root rather than breaking,
so they could reangle themselves

from the ground
or so I could help them upright,
which I did, with bricks,

with sticks and string,
and though they lean, they lean
toward the sky.

______________________________________________________________________

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. Her work is forthcoming in The Common online and Denver Quarterly, and appears in anthologies including Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene. She teaches at UNC Wilmington, where she is editor of Ecotone, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.