although I do have two with peony in the title. They’re the only flower I use, except gardenias. And dahlias. A stand of peonies grew alongside the porch of my first home, and my father’s last front door was flanked by gardenias. My middle daughter calls herself Dahlia. It’s the same thing, really, a woman and the texture of a flower, how the thick petals of gardenias spread themselves flat against their emerald plate. I’m not much of a gardener. I keep the roses going, though they’re dormant much of the year. Five bushes wait outside the garage. I drive by every day, notice the first leaves in March, first blooms in May. By October they stand knee deep in their own waste. It’s such work to find new ways to describe them when another, even more beautiful, will arrive next spring anyway. But not my sister, bright red petal so full of herself everyone wanted to sink their teeth into her, or the other, clustered close to the ground, a creamy girl with a warm salmon center. They’re gone now. It went like this: mother, father, sister, sister, and it just keeps going. I watched a video to try and understand. A rose erupts from its sepals, firm and round, red lips puckered toward morning as slowly it unwinds greedy for sun. Raindrops pearl up like magnifying glasses. The rose in the video yawns wider and wider, until the calyx gives and the first petal falls to the mulch. Then another. The pistils have nothing to do but shiver.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Melody Wilson’s poems appear in Catamaran, Watershed, VerseDaily, West Trade Review, Emerson Review, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. Her manuscript Madre Dura was a finalist for the Catamaran Prize and the Louisville Review National Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from Pacific University.
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