narthecium ossifragum
Farmers believed that if their livestock ate these flowers, their legs would break. In reality the plant favors low-calcium soils, and eating calcium-poor diets weaken bones.
Carbonized quince roots were found in Herculaneum,
so, for the tourists, they plant quince here now. This is sort of like you and me.
I have been planting quince for a long time, also snails, roses, neurons,
bombs, cilantro. These are things I have found records of in the soil
of our backyard, and purchased from the corner store because,
archeologists surmise, I love you.
God, we were a rich city! Now you’re three hundred skeletons and I’m a beach.
Almost peaceful, something to lie down upon and listen to the waves
of ash. On our European honeymoon, I went roaming for wildflowers,
uprooted them by the yellow elbowful for you. Turns out it’s bad luck
to give your young wife bone-breaker, lay gold bone-breaker like a long fuse
coccyx to clavicle impatient for an endgame: the black chrysanthemum
of eruption, maiden-hair down a mountainside to the sea.
We go to Italy. Like ten thousand before us we say, who builds a city on a volcano
anyway? The truth is this flower
does not break your bones, but it grows only in a land that someday will.
Carbonized quince roots were found in Herculaneum,
so, for the tourists, they plant quince here now. This is sort of like you and me.
I have been planting quince for a long time, also snails, roses, neurons,
bombs, cilantro. These are things I have found records of in the soil
of our backyard, and purchased from the corner store because,
archeologists surmise, I love you.
God, we were a rich city! Now you’re three hundred skeletons and I’m a beach.
Almost peaceful, something to lie down upon and listen to the waves
of ash. On our European honeymoon, I went roaming for wildflowers,
uprooted them by the yellow elbowful for you. Turns out it’s bad luck
to give your young wife bone-breaker, lay gold bone-breaker like a long fuse
coccyx to clavicle impatient for an endgame: the black chrysanthemum
of eruption, maiden-hair down a mountainside to the sea.
We go to Italy. Like ten thousand before us we say, who builds a city on a volcano
anyway? The truth is this flower
does not break your bones, but it grows only in a land that someday will.
Emma Cairns Watson coordinates university conferences on Egyptology and Armenian art by day and inhales other people’s poetry by night. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse Online, Half Mystic, Menacing Hedge, and Okay Donkey, and is forthcoming in Ninth Letter and RHINO.
