Tag: sunflowers

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset by Joemario Umana

~ ONE ART ~ 4 Comments

September Like Sunflowers At Sunset

I do not know how to hold endings,
so I open the window and let September out
and another month in. The wind heavy with wingbeat
reminds me of all the days I have lent my body
to reclusion. In the field, sunflowers turn their faces
toward what is leaving, as if beauty is a lesson
in surrender. Memory unfolds the words of a friend, that
every dusk is a gate and the soul must walk through
it with open palms. Now look at my trembling hands
being a testimony. I want to believe that every goodbye
carries a seed, that even silence can bloom yellow
inside the throat of grief. That’s why I lean into this
evening light and whisper my ache into the fading air,
let the wind carry it like a secret and lay it among the petals
of sunflowers already leaning into sleep, as I learn
to gather light in my chest even as darkness
sharpens its knives. And maybe when night
finally comes, it will find me open,
my body a field where even sorrow
leans toward the sun.

*

Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and a performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. His works have appeared in trampset, Strange Horizons, LOLWE, Chestnut Review, Isele Magazine, Orange Blossom Review, Frontier Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry Column-NND and elsewhere. He tweets @JoemarioU38615.

Three Years Later by Julia Kolchinsky

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Three Years Later

When it began, we feared the end
would come too quick, like summer rain, but war
leaves roots and heliotropes towards flame, a sunflower

weighed by grip and reaching. A Baba stuffed sunflower
seeds into an invading soldier’s pockets, you’ll end
up in our soil, she told him, but at least your war

will grow you, turn you into something beautiful. War
is water that drowns as it quenches. The sunflowers,
like open wounds or mouths, demand it doesn’t end

like this. War doesn’t end in sunflowers, it begins—

*

Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist of the Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.