G-NT3806KSJP

Fireweed





i.

I put a flower on the dashboard, a flower in my room, a flower on the company, and a flower in my nose. I sneezed. I coughed out a brown smoke, the sky crusted over, and I bought a little potted plant. I bought a little rose-scented shampoo.


ii.


A little rose-scented shampoo in the dry summer arrived as a miracle. Brown-orange sky, a miracle. Anything, when seen with the right attitude, is a kind of miracle. Patterson Construction, for instance, drove their sparkling machinery into the dry fields. I inhaled, through my nose, the engineered scent of a miracle. The company struck stone!


iii.


The company said put a flower on the backhoe (metal strikes stone) on the housing development (a spark) near your throat (falls on dry grass) if you’re going to San Francisco (flares)


iv.


Each spring a bloom, each summer a drought. Pinecones need fire to release their seeds. The company tells me all fires are wild (accident, spark against stone—)


v.


The company gives me a little flower. It was a miracle no one got hurt, they say. Each little flower is a miracle!





Lindsey Webb is the author of a chapbook, House (Ghost Proposal, 2020). Her poetry and other writings have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, jubilat, and Vestiges, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.