All I wanted was a white sheet in a white room
and your milk body, too.
A bed where each time you’d make me a stranger
and we could frenzy
like moths tethered to light.
A temporary blindness, summertime.
What then of the black flowers
that grew inside, contortions
allowed: bruises,
slow-opening blood-lilies?
Because I was your little pressed flower, translucent
beneath
the red sheet
where I’d always bloom but never
quite enough.
Ariel Kusby is a writer and bookseller based in Portland, Oregon. She currently works in the Rose and Orange rooms at Powell’s City of Books, where she pays special attention to children’s books about witches, odd cookbooks, and gnome gardening guides. You can check out her writing at www.arielkusby.com.