Self-portrait as windowsill flowers Claire Whetzel
i am blueweed, columbine, queen anne’s lace. i am wildflowers of the valley pressed between wax in heavy books, placed by berry-stained fingertips in a blue glass jar on white-painted windowsills. i am yarrow, monkshood, bitter dogbane. i’m the smell of chamomile, but the flower, not the tea, never the tea. i heard that trillium grows at the bottom of the mountain and i go, cut the stem neatly, don’t twist. at night, i am sure to draw the curtains and place the vases on the table. i am lupine, pearly everlasting, and the blue, bell-shaped blooms that grow on the side of each gravel road, but what are they called again? i am bay windows framing bottles of single blossoms and cicada skins and dried pine needles and dulse, still smelling of the sea. i am rapeseed, ginkgo, and cherry blossom their petals translucent and plastered by oil to city pavement. i’m market bouquets poorly haggled for and panes streaked gray with summer rain and the smell of dust blown in from the west. i’m bud and leaf and blossom, snipped and pulled and placed. i am sugared water, tied stems, slow-wilting heads, and fine, yellow pollen collecting on white-painted windowsills, swept away by a red, damp rag again and again.
24
