Portrait of a Small Town Where the Flower Shop has Committed Suicide
By Eli Karren
“Portrait of a Small Town Where the Flower Shop has Committed Suicide” by Eli Karren is the first runner-up of the 2024-25 Previously Published Poem Prize, selected by Palette editors. We’re honored to share this vibrant poem with you.
This poem was first published in Cimarron Review, issues 216, 217, & 218.
My brother taught me to fold a chess board so tight
I can win a game on a paper crane’s wing.
Our neighborhood drowns
in the violet hue of summer stolen, while evening arrives
like blueberries to concrete, a Mason Jar rear-
ending God. Everything
in suburbia wishes it was something else. Mercury
dripping to the bottom of a thermometer dreams
of telling time. And so, it is here,
I can garner inspiration from ambiguity. The shipwrecks
of parked cars and stalled heartbeats glow
phosphorescent in the moon’s
unambitious lather. The average town harbors hundreds
of stalagmites, you just need to know where to look.
Past the widows pouring cyanide
into birdbaths, and the flower shop that rouged its petals
with a pistol of pesticide, there is a semi-reluctant truth.
Have you ever seen a crow
perched on nothing? Just waiting in the space between
ideas; where the fire trucks fly by and I remember
how to unfold our origami dawn.