Creative Corner: The Wildflower Girl

Creative+Corner%3A+The+Wildflower+Girl

From “SONGS OF ESTRANGED WOMEN: A Collection of Prose Poems”

The Wildflower Girl

I was birthed on the bed of a dying September, body corkscrewing from the knotted depths of stone-soil, an offering to the gods of chimney smoke and cloud-caulked skies. My mother was an ancient peach tree, her brittle arms, rough with years, cradling my skull, leaf palms sticking to the dampness of my skin. I was a child of fading sunsets, drops of magenta and tangerine gathering in the dip of my hipbones, forcing filaments of grass into brilliant marriage in their viscosity. The petals of my ears curled in an envelope of autumn chill and I was told that, in my first few days of life, I spun the plane of my face endlessly across the heavens, ensnared in a futile dance with light.

Later I would paint each day on the backs of my hands so I wouldn’t forget their colors: dark red for the roses that pressed their foreheads to springtime altars, black for the curls of smoky wind that tugged at roots of summer grass, blue for crumbled berry corpses, left to crawl up from the earth time and again with all the transiency of a phoenix. It wasn’t long before I had memorized the patterns of the neighbor’s shoe bottoms, the tires of a Mercedes, the things that could carry me.

When the world had been squeezed to the last drops of a year I would dream in cold mornings and watch soft-skinned peaches clothe themselves in funeral browns and violets, losing their sweetness to the hardening in the air. They twisted their mouths from the stem soundlessly, for they had never learned to scream, plummeting, wingless, into the ground at my feet, bodies leaking the last of their lives between my toes. Sometimes I wondered where they would have went if they had been given parachutes, been allowed to do something besides fall, but beautiful things were meant to be crushed beneath the feet of men.