I’ll Always Bring Blooms
When Lio asks if I’ll always bring them flowers, I say yes. After I die, I will bribe the wind to carry blooms across their doorway. When Lio, who uses gender neutral pronouns, asked, I answered without thinking, so I know it’s true: This isn’t poetry — it’s a promise. Because I love them as I have loved no other. And I will steal my little lion the blossoms from every well-kept yard in town until I, and my amputated leg, can no longer run away. — Shannon Perkins
The Writer in My Window
My first apartment faced a building of open curtains. I created characters of each tenant, especially the young man in the window directly across, always writing furiously. A poet, I imagined, writing about me, his unsuspecting muse. In my lease’s final week, I taped up a note: “3RD FLOOR WRITER, UR CUTE, TEXT ME.” Replies poured in: neighbors praising my courage or staking claim on their spouses, just in case. My poet — a law student, not a bard — wrote in last. Our lackluster date failed fantasy. Afterward, he returned to his musings, a faint silhouette behind curtains now closed. — Savannah DesOrmeaux
Inhaling the Rain
You were a silent shadow — a calm, fiercely feminist, piously Muslim presence that assuaged my father’s wounded childhood. I knew you, grandfather, only from a distance, separated by geography. You wrote me letters that I didn’t understand, wanting to share your wisdom, the depths of which I couldn’t yet swim. Nine years after you passed, I visited. Graveside, a dark storm suddenly split the sky open. Disbelief pierced through. It was not monsoon season yet. But you knew the way monsoons make my heart dance. Here it was, rain. Unseasonal, untimely, unrelenting. Through it, I saw you, not adjacent but alongside. — Srijoni Rahman
A Gift to U.S.
Shortly before a milestone anniversary, my mother-in-law was delighted to discover a tattered box on the kitchen table containing a romantic gift from her forgetful but hardworking husband: a collection of tableware — every knife, fork and spoon engraved with the word “US.” Beaming, she immediately replaced her old flatware and proudly recounted the romantic gesture to dinner party guests that evening. Later, my father-in-law came clean. A retired military man, he’d found the cutlery at an Army surplus store, oblivious to the anniversary. Now, my mother-in-law laughs, “He was always a good man, and sometimes a good husband.” — Amy Cooper Collier
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