Flora

From Manuelzinho.

Winter, 2019–2020 / No. 44

She’s born under a broccoli leaf

delivered by the hermit next door

the pills I take transform his voice

to an abacus of inaudible words

the white-gold sky

bursts open like a boy in love

I’m too high to know if I’m holding

my daughter or a sea bass

her mouth is dramatic and I swear

she has scales!

Everything glitters—

the garden, the clouds, her skin

Manuel’s strange and sudden wings

He must have flown me home

for when I wake, sunset blooms

in the garden of our wallpaper

Flora sleeps

still as a pinned butterfly

Manuelzinho snores gently

exhausted by fatherhood

I was not built

to hold this much love

Leesa Dean is a graduate of the University of Guelph's M.F.A. program and a creative writing instructor at Selkirk College, in British Columbia. Her first book is Waiting for the Cyclone. She lives in the Kootenays, on an acreage, surrounded by crashed cars and fruit trees. Last updated winter, 2019–2020.