Each Evening
By Chelsea Bunn

she walks through the backyard
plucking
the heads off flowers.
Her father is teaching her to garden:
this is what keeps them
alive - removing
their atrocities, the brittle versions
of loss - something
about this angers
and offends her -
the hardened petals
of each flower
dying differently,
as if she has no choice
but to rip them off,
crumbling
their orange and red horrors
between her fingers -
as if she were to blame
(someone is always to blame).
Marigolds, the golden disasters,
stuck like sculptures
to their stems -
petunias,
the blooms
impetuous knives,
easily detached.
She dreads this complicity
each evening -
separating the dead
from the living, pulling the scorched
blades from their graves,
as if she is somehow
part of this,
as if with her devastation,
summer ends.