It Isn’t About the Flowers

Not the peony’s exuberant edges
slowly scorched.
Not the furl and wrinkle,
the puckered blooms,
but the way they remind you
of your hands in your pockets.
And you’re surprised
as though you’d forgotten
your hands were there
growing older too.
You press them
into the earth.
There’s a tonic
beneath surfaces.
You feel for the root
the weighty place where
another year is balled up
ready to release.

Sandra Fees is the author of The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and served a term as Berks County Poet Laureate (2016-2018). Her work has recently appeared in The Blue Nib, Kissing Dynamite, and Sky Island Journal.