Poetry from Laurel Radzieski

Photo: raw pixel

Reasons That a Person Would Have for Cutting Off the Tops of the Tulips and Leaving Them Where They Fell

The tulips were yellow.
The culprit was beheaded

in a recent past life. A young boy
thought he had found a stunning gift

for his mother but upon receival she made
him bring them back. Yellow is unlikeable.

The tulips are a reminder of suspected infertility.
Flowers often ask to be cut. The individual needed

to influence his surroundings. This is the picture game
where you find the differences—the other picture contains intact tulips.
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Laurel Radzieski‘s debut poetry collection, Red Mother (NYQ Books, 2018), is a love story told from the perspective of a parasite. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and she is a poetry editor for Clockhouse. Laurel has been a Resident Artist at the Wormfarm Institute and her poems have appeared in The Golden Key, Really System, The Slag Review and elsewhere, including on roadsides in rural Wisconsin. She lives in northeast Pennsylvania with her husband and a fish.