Grayhead, avalanche, leilani:
our family portraits showcase
brilliant florets, how we speak
love with our bell-shaped tongues.
How long we’ve persisted
and thrived with proud stems
towering in tallgrass prairie.
Forgive me now for conjuring
unblooming, the imagery of
bouquets pulled and withered.
Thrashing blight hitting its peak.
Forgive me thinking that more
metaphors remain for bodies
cast as coneflowers:
trans bodies bright and waving
in an offering of pink and blue.
Forgive me—I know I should
be mild. Chamomile, smears
in some impressionistic landscape
art galleries pull out in June.
I know that it’s uncomfortable
to hear dried petals whisper
let us be instead of giving
into quiet fade, a color-sucking
tragedy. What language outside
simile compels you to see violence?
Forgive me pleading grace
when I owe none
but to my elders, siblings, sisters
so much larger than a poem,
owed much more than poems
but their roots and earth below
them. What’s blossoming and full.
Forgive me for all I could be doing,
what I do that’s not enough.
Forgive me making our grief into
meadows, for thinking if I offer
something pretty
people will not look away—