Chitra Ganesh, To Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Mother, Pressed
She instructs me in her vacant way
to identify the flower
by looking inside the blossom—
deep inside the blossom
to spy its waxy alchemy,
the sight of her pink
skirt and pointed yellow feet
flattened between two sheets
of translucent paper,
while at the same time
butterflies vie for her hair,
my shirt is stained
by pollen, her bosom
looms above my head
and a thought deep inside
the sun whites her face out.
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Best New Poets. She grew up in Durham, North Carolina, and lives in Cincinnati. (updated 8/2014)