Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper
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 Feathers: A Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal (Essay Press, 2024), which won the Essay Press Book Prize; the poetry collections Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and Best Bones (Pittsburgh, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; and the chapbook The Creation Museum (Small Harbor Publishing, 2022). She serves as Emerging Poet Feature editor for 32 Poems and is founding director of The School for Living Futures, an experimental project dedicated to shifting culture in a time of climate change. (updated 4/2025)