The Poppies

The poppies are straining towards the sun like baby birds towards their

mother. Drinking in orange. “Quit moping,” I’d tell him. Just barely pink,

falling into white. The flesh of Tintoretto’s Susanna. She uses her

apostrophes all wrong, and has no command over the comma. It’s so

boring, that I become nostalgic for the Castro Theater. I can smell the

lemon blossoms from the kitchen. Birds are noisy here, and I could never

stand a rain forest. She blamed the spiders on the bush by the window

and hacked its tallest branches. Now it’s just the stucco’s dull pastel. Just

the fading of his wink.