Checkout

Carts full of Allura Red AC and a chip 

reader at the cash register where we

are firm believers in a boquet

for the parking lot and another

for kitchen tables, like Ernie Johnson

(look it up (everyone deserves flowers)).

Dreaming of long sleep in prairie grass

where we may be among bug and bone.

I'm trying to say we could be flowers

not for stillness or for beauty but

for the weave 

of square stem (let us be 

mint) and opposite leaves (let us be

honeysuckle) and purple anthers (let us be

pollinators).

Thumbing fuzzy calyx like fiberglass

we wonder why we conjure inorganic

when searching for a natural language.

Blame it on dye and corn syrup

--how badly we ache to know the neighbors

in our gardens.

Kyle William McGinn is a union organizing, basketball coaching, Chihuahua-owning poet whose work has appeared in Stonecoast Review, Watershed Review, The Under Review, and This Thing Called Poetry: An Anthology of Poems by Young Adults with Cancer from Finishing Line Press. He is a University of Wisconsin-River Falls graduate and holds an MFA from Hamline University. He is a Saint Paul native living in the woods of Western Wisconsin.