For my friend weeping at the coffee shop

Because he is reading a poem about peonies
which is really not about peonies
but maybe about prayer, the truest kind,
or about grief and how we’re spared
a home in its depths, given just enough soil
to catch our knees, collapse in the dark,
stay until we remember some purpose
beyond pain, past uncertainty,
begin to uncurl under a faint light that insists
on pulling us up, breathing us
nursling green, tender bloom,
this unimaginable bravery to come undone
and still be summoned by trembling touch
to a life that wants us wholly, here,
a delicate beauty amid so much else
we call beautiful
— the wild pen,
these rivered lines,
the morning shaken open.

*

Briefly

As I check out Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous” at the library, the man
behind the counter eyes the cover, notes
he keeps waiting.
“For what?” I ask.
“To be briefly gorgeous.”
I laugh. His face, sunned pink under his baseball cap,
breaks into a grin.
“Every morning when I look in the mirror, I wait.
Is today the day?”
“That you’ll be briefly gorgeous?”
I smile wide, chest sugared,
body leafing, as it knows it can.
He is not unhandsome, tall, maybe late 50s,
light olive button-down shirt over loose jeans,
reddish-brown graze of a beard.
“Nope, still hasn’t happened, not even
briefly,” he says, cheeks bright-winged,
winking warmth in his eyes.
I insist there must be something to see
and — to myself — to love.
He refutes.
We keep chuckling.
“One day,” I offer as he hands me the book,
along with a tale of humpback whales. “One day, you’ll see
— forget briefly, you’ll be enduringly gorgeous.”
I leave, bounty in hands, cocooned by his mirth,
and watery, too, punctured by how it happens.
One moment we’re wrapped in our busy lives.
The next we look up,
a sudden intimacy
to scour everything clean.

*

Naila Francis is a poet from Philadelphia. Her poems have appeared in Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice, the Healing Verse Poetry Line, Voicemail Poems, North of Oxford and Wild Greens. Her first poetry album, “Wonder Unsung,” a collaboration with guitarist and producer Paulito Muse, was released in 2024.