How do I deserve a bumblebee in my squash flower?
Honey-bearers—endangered—orchestrate
through pheromones and dance. And what of this
squash flower? How can I believe Adam
came first when the flower precedes the fruit?
Primary yellow and splayed wide open, the bloom
always knows first what is coming. Hours before the storm,
her flower crumples into itself. Splay and shut. Splay and shut.
The way kindliness and brutality, touch—gentle and not—
passes between the legs of a woman.
Until the time the flower begins to grow a gourd.
Swollen, hard, long and bulging
as though the squash is at once man and woman.
I tell my partner I am as much as him.
Remind him writing is as important as accounting,
although it pays nothing.
I tell him he does not see me.
He replies, but I do I love you.
To love and to see are not the same.
Urging him to look at me. I want this morning to be a squash flower
splayed open, unguarded. Bring me coffee, my sturdy cucurbitaceae,
and let it be for this morning only the birdsong that enters me.
Glory and Her Gourd
