A Terrible Blooming

Something stricken from a pedestal and buried, god-like and handsome out of view. I at my kitchen table, hungry for nothing but resurrection by point and click, each yellow envelope another yielding. I would push away the rock, the cave dank and trembling, its heavy birthing. I wrote the names in my pages, saved them to a hard drive that would live in another state. The stereo played women with outsize hair and voice, Magdalenes who might wash my feet, not his. I opened the tomb—a terrible blooming: Fungus seeding blood. Fir tree growing in a lung. Buckwheat sprouting from a boy who knelt hours on ungiving grains. Pills that grace my tongue and hit my stomach, acid-burst so that I can sleep past and past and past. The poppy head on my shelf that dried then ruptured silent, tossed its dark residents across the bedroom floor. In enough numbers, they’ve been known to ease pain.

Morrow Dowdle (they/them) has poetry in or forthcoming from New York Quarterly, Pedestal Magazine, The Baltimore Review, and Poetry South, and other publications. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. They edit poetry for Sunspot Literary Journal and host “Weave & Spin,” a performance and open mic series featuring marginalized voices. A former psychiatric physician assistant, they teach workshops on healing trauma through poetry for organizations such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They also volunteer in advocacy for U.S. prison reform. They live in Hillsborough, NC.

A Song for Morrow