"Zinnias" by Tyler Mills

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 1, 2017   Zinnias   Tyler Mills

My father's mother grew a garden of zinnias to divide the house from the woods:   pop art tops in every color—cream, peach, royal purple, and even envy   (white-green, I knew, and when the pale petals opened in early August,   I thought they'd blush like an heirloom tomato, heir-loom, how strings of wine-dyed   wool lay over the frame of an idea, how my cheeks look in the mirror   after a run, always the wrong time of day, thunder rolling around the stadium   of trees, or the sun striking the boughs with light over and over as though to plead   the green right out of the leaves, or so it seems to me,   too sensitive, she would say, her love scientific)—the sunburst petals   a full spectrum except for the sea returning to you, blue, blue,   the color appearing in language only when we could know it like a cluster of stars   in the arms of another galaxy while ours spirals around a black hole,   and now they grow in space, in the satellite where we live out an idea of permanence   among galactic debris, acquiring stars, losing vision, the skin touching nothing,   the heads little suns you watch die on the stem if you want the bloom back.            Copyright © 2017 Tyler Mills. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "When I was writing this poem, I was exploring the sentence and how it can move. I was also thinking about my grandmother's zinnias. Zinnias were among the first flowers to bloom in space, on the International Space Station." —Tyler Mills   Tyler Mills is the author of Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). She teaches at New Mexico Highlands University and lives in Santa Fe.   Photo credit: Arik Lubkin Poetry by Mills   Tongue Lyre (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) "picking flowers" by Nate Marshall "Hothouse" by Raymond McDaniel "Sakura Park" by Rachel Wetzsteon Help Support Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038