Perhaps we should have let the flowers be. We’d seen them by a sidewalk, somewhere in the city we called mother. They had a life of their own, all orange and yellow, and we had shoes worn down to their last wishes. In the throes of frustration, we seized them by the stalks, pulled them out and ate them, eyes closed, hearts pounding. We were never the same again. We started to make up stories about the tall grass and write them on the walls. We love to watch them grow in this nutshell of a room. All words are just one word that we ache to find before it’s lost, erased as if there was nothing in it – not even a wave to break. Sometimes we feel it at the back of our throats, but the sounds are unutterable, the taste unidentified. It keeps us awake at night. We make love until the end, but we are still here every day. In this nutshell of a place we try to become everyone and everything in the world, so that death will have no more to do with us. It’s not easy to take the life of a stranger and we don’t always dream with one mind, so yesterday we broke all the glasses in the kitchen. Today we drink water from each other’s hands. Perhaps we should have let the flowers be.
Basiliké Pappa (she/her) lives in Greece. Her work has appeared in 11 Mag Berlin, Bones Journal for Contemporary Haiku, Surreal Poetics, Dodging the Rain, Eunoia Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Timeless Tales, Sonic Boom, Intrinsick and Visual Verse, and is forthcoming in Heron Tree.