Mother
my little nubbins are truest buttons, fuchsia-shiny, squat; skew
slewing over my pot, from my weak limbs faster
to go down than out:
I know the sun is bullshitting
lately, squatting haunch too far to the left,
know I’ve lost some leaves, but
my blossoms are bullets, slower than light,
sleeking light with bulbed shots of cellulose,
give pug-faces
to the soft ones over there. who start plump
as princesses and end up blowsy in days. and these
fine, these firm-shouldered, I hold them till they fall.
Leah Claire Kaminski teaches writing at UC Irvine and is assistant editor at the brand-new The Rise Up Review; you can find her work in Tupelo Quarterly, The Bellingham Review, and Catch Up, and upcoming in Witness Magazine and RHINO. She’s shopping her first book around. In the meantime, follow her sporadic missives on twitter @leahkaminski.