Fresh Flowers
Flowers flooded the killing plane
ground up lamb brain and daisies
Dog pads sashayed into hot filth floors
two-inch thick slop, chopped daisies
Hit, wrought together garden fence
circle-stomped, trampled daisies
Mary pressured your hand till faint
knuckles stone starred and daisied
Stench immense and plain as barn shit
squelched to hurt – planted daisies –
Clean cut, gushed from ceiling shackles
hung upside down and daisies
Metal rod above a lamb eye
hazy-missed-a-spot daisies
Into ooze, patched and bloom-swirled
marked, a bouquet of daisies
Mary Leaves a Note
The note Mary left was the truth.
A fib Mary liked to dance around after sex.
When the moment of immense pleasure,
and therefore happiness and disregard
for all other things, had passed.
It would sink. Felt in the body
from head to chest cavity,
it always began to sting.
It was familiar.
The before sleep I-love-you-kisses,
a slight reassurance if we believe it to be so.
Just a little faith and a clap of the hands is all it would take.
Mary clapped in a different direction
and left it on the paper in front of the refrigerator.
In the same place as the grocery lists and Christmas card photos.
The place where it sat for two days, until you noticed.
A scrap of paper cluttered in with other scraps of paper,
dog-eared and ordinary and not said otherwise.
Andrew Wittstadt was born and raised outside Baltimore, Maryland. He holds graduate degrees from McNeese State University and his latest work has appeared in Bending Genres, Foothill, The New Limestone Review, The Cider Press Review, and Umbrella Factory Magazine. He currently lives and teaches in Las Vegas.
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