I Used to Eat Flowers
One with tiny white blooms, a little peppery. Even the grasses. I wanted to chew everything, to know it from the inside. Those ancient little brushes called horsetail. Especially those, bitter. And pine, and hemlock, needles between my teeth. Maybe I wanted to eat my life. Maybe I wanted to remember being the earth, while I was still close to it. I wish I could find those tiny white blooms in clumps on their stem. I am still on the lookout. There was some subversion, even then, the slippery boundary of what’s proper and not. It’s true I still eat a pine needle now and then, or try some tiny white flower to see if it’s the same, but the ones I used to eat were in fields that no longer exist. I looked up horsetail. It’s called a weed. I am all for weeds, frankly. Too much cultivation makes me nervous. It feels like exile. A deer came within ten feet of me yesterday. It just stood there in the field, its tail relaxed. It was inside my eye, looking out. The wild grasses were still on the earth, and we were still hungry.
FLEDA BROWN’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and is an Indie finalist. Read more.