Women and Other Flowers

Once upon a time a little girl turns thirteen and is transformed into a new EU citizen. She spends her first Irish winter desperate, weeping, her mother shrouding her in a floral duvet, her stalk-thin, pre-teen body pressed against the radiator in the hallway of their new apartment all one frosty night. Shivering, she clings to its heat, wheezing, a young willow battered by the wind, needing shelter in an arch of sunshine, ribs aching against metal ridges, her soft breathing intertwined with the whistling of something sinister trapped within, a symphony of shared corporeal struggle. Attempts at settling, at staying alive
and sentimentality do not suit perennial beings;
there are seasons for such morbid things,
ever after? —— a delicate time, spent
in the trauma of self-renewal,
preparing to be whole again.