LILY

Sometimes my mouth says lily when it means wish. 

I can already tell you think I’m devoted to you. 

A year ago, yes, that would have been just like me, susurrating 

pollen at your feet, smelling of funeral 

parlors and perfume counters

and begging with your fingers on my burning 

lips for water, but I’m not. 

I’m not devoted to you. 

Then what am I? 

I’m just a sweetmeat conjugated 

from your greatest desire into poison, 

and all at once I press you against the bed and set the house on fire. 

Here your spit bubbles like tar on the heaving 

drywall, and in my mind when you try

to escape it’s futile. 

For a while I thought I was cotton candy

on your tongue. 

And then, for a while, I thought I was a dahlia, 

all white and pink and lovely, there 

on the windowsill waiting for my handsome

keeper to cut my stems

and nose his way between my shiny petals. 

But a dahlia looks into your eyes and only tries its best 

not to disappoint you, withering under your negligent 

care while I’m out here in between the two, 

dissolving like sugar and getting deadlier 

by the second. I guess I’m just a lily.

Big deal. You still get to play the gardener. 

So where are we now, 

but caught colliding, exploding into 

butterfly carcasses on impact. 

In one version I pull you out of the wreckage, let you

carry me home and 

cut me shorter with pieces of the windshield. 

Everything is 

sweet and I never say wish again. 

Never mind. I take it back. 

In the vase today I see waxy, vulgar petals teeter

between fidelity and poison and then fall

silently onto smoldering bedclothes, 

those triumphant newborn antagonisms. 

Don’t you see? The fools we have made 

of one another, 

of the house built to keep us safe, 

of a flower that murders through no fault of its own. 

​