Flowerless Garden
She sits down on a rusty chair.
Melts the pen into blank page:
where is the duende?
Her heart rising and falling
reminds her she’s alive,
the rest is death.
Butterfly with shattered eyes
no flowers in her hair today.
A firecracker on her tongue,
a lemon squeezed inside the throat.
Marshmallows in her sticky palm.
Overhead an airless plastic bag.
Sparkless tearful eyes.
A white dove with broken wings,
a paint horse without its hooves.
Toothless lion trapped
in a jungle of hyenas.
No antibiotic for her pain.
Italian writer in Bangkok.
Thank you for reading.
I wrote this more than twenty years ago as part of my Senior Thesis in Creative Writing. I was living in tremendous emotional pain. Writing, meditation, and faith — not necessarily in this order — saved my life.
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