THE FLORIST
When I take my prescriptions I halve them carefully with the edge of a slanted tweezer blade. Call this predictable; I call it intimate. I can almost imagine myself a florist. I can almost immediately imagine myself an intimate florist, in a shop no one visits, down a curving cobbled street. It’s dark. There are golden lamps. My vista windows soon to frame an alley instead of the red and silver daytime skyline, Self said. Maybe a dumpster or a laundry vent. It’s dark, and I can only ever taste the inside of my mouth, ashy and uninviting.
I woke up dead yesterday over daytime email, but do I? Self said, I’m right here standing at my workstation like I always have to do.
The sky like tissue paper, landscape a tearable reel of brownstone, brownstone, hospital, tree, glare from behind it all, watery. Self said, I am a direct dismissal of an animal at work, excused exclusively by teeth. I miss my husband when he’s at work and I’m at work.
I think, There are so many altos and so many instrumentals, instructional videos of all of them.
I feel like.
I finger the carnations. I push the baby’s breath behind my ears. I watch out the diminishing window for someone, tonight, to come by.
Thea Brown is the author of the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press 2013), the full-length collection Think of the Danger (H_NGM_N 2016), and the forthcoming full-length Famous Times (Slope Editions 2019). Recent poems can be found in Tupelo Quarterly, Bennington Review, Oversound, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore.