Growing Flowers

Another day of last breaths in thin light

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash.

I spend my life in a bowl, eating with my head down, ducking fighter jets sailing past my ears, lift my head and all

my eye-contact is gone, buried in a reservoir, I’m left with sidelong glances, swallowed by dying-

lightbulb light, sometimes I empty of bravery and resolve, and sometimes being empty

of resolve looks like bravery, until life passes like a train with flowers in its cigar-smoke stack,

a lamb’s on the rise and I meet it, stroke its wool, then amble by skewed-ear fence to where two-year-old barbs are crushed

down from a backpacking trip on Veterans Day with flattened-purple-flower friends I’d plucked and placed

in my notebook, I kick another beer can and tell myself, illusion, but my friend lost her brother to the mouth of a gun, locked the

dogs in the house and set the house on fire, shot himself in the head because life came out of focus,

I whistle with my taste-bud tongue, seeds like the start of new flowers, in smokestacks, in fields, growing.

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Hey, I’m Roman. I’m working on my debut novel, 20XX, a work in magical realism. I also vlog about the writer’s journey on Substack.