Every Yassified-Millenial-Feminista-Wine-Mom Has a T-Shirt Emblazoned with the Slogan “Not Fragile like a Flower — Fragile like a BOMB.
140 million years ago,
the first flower danced
its way to the water’s surface and
took its inaugural breath.
No weight on its chest,
it held its head high,
crowned by the sky —
aquatic bisexual royalty.
Magnolia’s greatest-of-the-greats-grandparent
spent its life self-pollinating,
creating and sustaining a beauty
that still defies all explaining yet,
nothing is eternal.
Even with no human hands to pluck, flowers wilt —
they get eaten by turtles.
Nature kills;
nature dies.
In 11th century China,
humans first had a mind
to light their hate on fire,
combine it with gunpowder,
and plant it in each other’s chests.
We tried, even then,
to harvest poetry from death,
naming bombs like Adam
naming beasts in the garden:
the first, “Thunderclap.”
Later, “Little Boy” and
“Fat Man”.
As if giving them names
could erase the lingering fingerprints
of our DNA
from the crime scenes birthed by their explosion.
But their corrosion supernova’d its way
into our minds’ eyes
and now we describe ourselves
as made in their image.
A gory visage.
We sew ourselves
in the fields of life —
landmines,
not wildflowers,
prompting others
to while away their hours
not in admiration,
but in soft-stepping,
so as not to set us off.
Instead of pomegranate blossoms
grenadine sweet
we deem our seeds
shrapnel —
fragmentation less fragile
for its ability to inflict pain:
human heart
and tongue
and hand
grenades.
Plucking petals like floral charades
miming plucking out the pin
and letting our fears ignite.
These are the stakes:
to make a world in which all of God’s children can live
or to go into the dark?
With no daisies in sight
instead of petals
counting down
87
86
85 seconds to midnight.
Poppies and oleander will
attend to our graves.
Long after delicate flesh has given way
to worms
they will bloom,
just as they did after World Wars I & II.
Not even nuclear fission can deter their eulogy;
the earth vibrates with their poetry.
Why be a bomb? they say,
when you could be
that which Darwin called
an abominable mystery?
At the end of the world
you’ll find me
in a dandelion crown—
flower bombing.
*
Everyone I Love is a Poet
The boy who buries pottery
to lay to rest a relationship long dead,
returning clay to clay
as we will all someday be returned dust to dust.
He refuses to further break that which is already broken
and, in so doing, heals himself.
The girl who unironically writes pop-punk love songs for her cat,
rhyming “time” with “time” time and time again —
a modern Cyndi Lauper:
lost,
looking,
finding.
The adult who picks up every hitchhiker they see,
answering their own childhood prayers
for momentum and understanding,
knowing that running on fumes is not a moral failing
and we all sometimes need
someone to refill our tanks.
The grandfather who takes his breaks from the mines
to crochet rainbow blankets for his children’s children,
stitching strength into beauty
that emanates its own warmth.
The jeers of his peers be damned,
Love’s rough hands can still be dexterous.
For what is a poem
but a pot,
or a song,
or a prayer,
or an afghan?
What is a poet but someone who
in fierce gentleness
resists despair?
*
R.J. Gordon is an avid board-gamer, a (very rusty) classical violinist, and an Assistant Professor of Religion at Transylvania University. From 2019-2025 she was an active member of the Black on Black Rhyme Tallahassee poetry community, and together they wrote, produced, and released the spoken word album Rebel Dreams on Spotify in the summer of 2020. She now reads and writes and performs with the folks of Poetry at the /’tāb(ə)l/ in Lexington, KY. This is her first publication.
