Amy Nocton
She was like a crinkled poppy; with the desire to drink dry dust.—Virginia Woolf
How were we to know her? She
was a whisper of the blue flame that once sustained
us with its white wild. Under her clothes,
she hid, or so we imagined, wings
—a crinkled secret—
of what they would become. Poppy
red was her flower with all that it carried, scarlet seasons
of her past—the burn
—of want. But that was yesterday,
and long before she began
to drink her dandelion wine. Before she began
to dry her collected pearls, lilac, and bleeding hearts,
and grind them
into dust.