Roses

in memory, Lynn

The more she is crowded by tumors the more she chooses this: butter enough to choke a dog. Sugar
piled on her Cream of Wheat. Roses that open gorgeously — she hobbles out to see. Her peonies
outrageously sexy, the color divine. Whole churches push up from the ground to worship less.
Looking over her work, brick she scavenged from fire edging her beds, her eyes hold eagerness and
yearning. Where do you want your ashes to go? I ask in my brutal way. Oh, she says lightly, I think
under the roses, don’t you? And I don’t know what I’ll know a year from now, how sure I will feel
of her lingering there.

 

 

 

Author of the article

Poems by Alice Duggan have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Water-Stone Review, Tar River Poetry; also in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing, from Green Fuse Press and an anthology, Home, from Holy Cow! Press. She’s interested in dailiness, in colloquial language, in the idiosyncratic corners of life.