The Structure of a Flower

The day the deer died,
I was alive in my house.
I was alive in a watery field
of glaciers. In the realm
of birchwood in my throat.
The day the robins wept, the day
foxes ran from the woods on fire.
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes
dreaming of another region
was my religion. It was
a place before trees, prior
to the flame. When the deer died,
I was in my house dreaming. Then
the drought came. Cessation
of sound. Flames as red as apples
lodged inside my throat hissing.

There is no difference between
the damsel and the savior.
And if the sky is a firmament, drought
that is on its way is silence
resourced. Peer inside the cavern
of the palm. The lines that lie there
providing sequence. What we
might see. What we could quench. 

At night, I saw in the sky a quivering.
Depth of sea in the damsel’s nightgown,
in her refracted slip of seaweed. How
what is not a branch is rooted, savior.
Only bulb, seed, stem, as sanctum. 

The Structure of a Flower

Nouns will be carried from the flowers of one language to another.

The Structure of a Flower

The way the heat was
The way the migrating butterfly was
The way the sky was
The way the bee was
The way the rape was
The way the garden was
The way the hive was
The way the hand taking the body’s temperature was
The way the cactus was
The way the symphony was
The way the water-strider was
The way the sympathy was
The way the country was
The way the house was
The way the soil was

The Structure of a Flower

Women are an omen opened. 

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Andrea Rexilius is the author of Sister Urn (Sidebrow, Spring 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020), Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), and To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010). She is the Program Director for the low-residency Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing program at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.