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Edited on Fri Dec-05-08 07:58 AM by RetroLounge
The Tulip Thief, Mi Amor
At first it was an ember; its glow I nursed like a welt after the open wound you left in the row. Anger, yes, but what is anger if not passion? Sparks, if not chemistry? A lab of mulch, calyx, and bitterroot. Your neat snips—kitchen shears?—selective: not the first in the row, yet the second and today the third. My pretty girls, my charming darlings. Oh, the hours I conjured their hue of red—for cheerful and its stain of glamour. Tulip, native of Asia, sister of Geisha— petals demure, dainty and closed each evening. I've contemplated a linger in the eaves with a shotgun. A friend suggests a garden hose. And like a misunderstood lover, I harbored plans—one with a black alder and epoxy—discarded for mercy. Your ache for beauty much like my own dogma. I know the gasp of a red petal on the asphyxiated heart—how it jumps! Perhaps, your wife has packed and paid for a ticket to the gas station where the attendant grows iris— so violet—clearly, a man who knows how to tend. You saw my tulips and thought to dazzle her back with scarlet; it's the true nature of violet, pure. I like to think my tulips save your marriage—you're off to Niagara Falls for a wet second honeymoon and surprise baby. This, I understand. Sometimes we need reckless acts to see each other again.
Suzanne Frischkorn
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Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of five chapbooks, most recently American Flamingo, (2008), and Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver for the Aldrich Poetry Award (2005). Lit Windowpane, her first full-length book, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Her poems have recently appeared, or are forthcoming in Ecotone, Indiana Review, Diode, No Tell Motel, MiPOesias, Salt Flats Annual, and the anthology Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk to Other Poems, part of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet Series (Knopf, 2007) From 2001 to 2005 she served as an editor for Samsära Quarterly. She is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism.
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RL
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