[7] Finding Eden

Finding Eden, or a Shy Girl's Pregame Pep Talk on Her Wedding Night
by Deidre Price

If Dickinson can do it,
so can I.

A'rowing her way into a wild night,
Miss Emily soothed that soul
with the rock, rock, rocking
of a lovesick lullaby.

I heard of arced backs
in that sleepy attic,

a scream in a chasm.

If Dickinson can do it,
so can I.

[6] Love in Bloom: A Traditional Haiku

Love in Bloom: A Traditional Haiku
by Deidre Price

happy hydrangeas
see us blooming beside them
in summer and love

[5] The Geography of Beverages

The Geography of Beverages
by Deidre Price

The satisfied condensation

slides down the pole of the cup,

this eager firefighter

both the battle and surrender.

Streams and rivers form,

growing and spreading

legs of a journey

untraveled.

They unravel and move

eastward, westward,

a watery occupation

across the coaster continent.

[4] Jack and Jillian

Jack and Jillian
by Deidre Price

When he walked, he wandered. It was impossible to separate the two. Often, Jack had found himself in crowds gathered in places he did not recognize. As time passed, he would pass with it, within it. Margins had begun to blur even more frequently in recent days, which led to the repeated experience of finding himself again and again.

It had been seven hundred eighty-three days since his wife miscarried their baby, and that made seven hundred eighty-two days since the morning he woke up to a note instead of Jillian beside him. In it, she wrote that the pregnancy had afforded her a vision of what the days ahead might be like with him, so permanent. It was only in the certainty of this pregnancy that she was finally certain about him. She could never have stayed, but now she had an explanation for leaving, and that made it easy enough to do.

He had always hated the home. He loved it only because she was in it. When she left it, he left, too. It sat, this abandoned, warehouse filled with memorabilia of a time no one wanted to remember. Many days, he sat the same.

[3] What It Means to Reach

What It Means to Reach
by Deidre Price

It's having faith
                           not fear
                                         in your fingers.                                   
                        

[2] Eulogy for a Sunflower

Eulogy for a Sunflower
by Deidre Price

The hue of you has smiled at me
mornings when only you were awake
and I, the sleepy fellow, met you
with hardly a crocodile smile.
I am sorry I did not blossom back
now that you're gone.

Big and brown bellied,
you grew taller than expected
with leaves that harnessed light,
bringing forth beauty and rest
for lying caterpillars and lipstick ladybugs.
But you moaned and curled in the heat.

I understand now that there comes a season
when everything must wilt,
even you, Sunflower, one so strong
that when winds came, you couldn't bend but just break,
bringing me this hardest lesson:
Sometimes the One who made us has to end us.