It is spring and my thoughts are filled with flowers, everywhere
I go noticing the pinks and whites, the crimson of the unburst buds,
the petaling, the unfolding in my mind of a thousand thousands—

outside of the mall I stop to photograph the first tender bloom
on an angular tree and my mother tells me it is a magnolia. A question
unfurls born from a lifetime of wondering how all the women

I know have collected the names of flowers like cuttings pressed
between their pages, how they can see a thing and know what it is.
On a bush beside my apartment door is a splash of yellow stars, four petals

curling out from the pistil and stamen like ripe fruit
and I call them banana flowers, not forsythia. I know
what a hosta is because my sibling complains

about the deer that won’t stop eating them. Every name
is a story about a life, every flower is a memory. On a long drive
down a wooded highway, I see the white cottony blooms

of the Bradford pears slowly colonizing the landscape,
so beautifully obvious against the background of branches barely
green-tipped with the new growth that will become

a lush summer canopy. Someone told me people plant them in Ohio
for the spring flowers not knowing what it means to be invaded.
We see a single tree and forget about how everything spreads.

In fact, it wasn’t very long at all before the cancer took her, one small seed 
in her breast slowly rooting and splaying through the countryside 
of her body, blooming everywhere. In the end, she was so full of flowers

that they burst from her mouth red onto the tissues. Since she’s gone, I can’t
stop noticing the pear trees, the plush clusters of tiny blossoms, the smell
of rotting meat. Now that I know, I see them everywhere I go.

Photo by Evgeniy Dronov on Unsplash