by Molly Pershin Raynor
i love how the tulips come first. then the lilies of the valley,
their perfumed necks bent like women in grief. i love how the
peonies unpeel their petticoats & shake their bracelets of ants.
how as a child i learned to count time by flowers, not numbers.
i love, in late june, how the fireflies pulse a slow honeyed song.
i love my momma’s peach roses & my dad’s raspberry patch.
i love the early girl tomatoes he helped me stake, thickening
green to orange like sinking suns over lake michigan. i love
every month where i shed an old self. summer nights in ann
arbor i itch for more than i am, how alive i turn in the wet
cave of dark when the whole tree town is a hungry heart,
trilling with the want of a million crickets, strumming their
bodies how my thighs rub together under lemonyellow
summer dress. i love saturday mornings, purple peppers in
my palms, garlic scapes writhing wild like octopus from purse
as i walk across crimson cobblestone of kerrytown, i love the
fat white mushrooms exploding in my backyard after the
flash floods, the way heat lightning ruffles the pinkblack
velvet of dusk in july. i am learning to sit in the thick of
a season, to turn it on my tongue & let the sugar fall like
s t a r s
in the midnight of my mouth.
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Molly Pershin Raynor is a poet and educator. Her poetry has been featured on NPR and published in several literary magazines including Vinyl, The Rumpus, Porkbelly Press and Split Lip Magazine. Her chapbook ZAFTIG is forthcoming from Fifth Avenue Press in Spring 2024. She co-founded RAW Talent with Donté Clark, a youth performing arts program in Richmond, California, and Staying Power, a youth-driven arts activism program in Ypsilanti. Her work is highlighted in the documentary film, “Romeo Is Bleeding” which was on Netflix.
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This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, an Ann Arbor-based poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local Washtenaw poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
