Fidelity by William Ward Butler - Poems | Academy of American Poets

Grocery store carnations / arranged on a kitchen table—

Grocery store carnations arranged on a kitchen table— call things what they are—they’re dead, the flowers, the water only delays their dying. Online, a biology forum debates what constitutes death: Tissue dies, someone writes, and everyone agrees though not on a definition. Theory of mind, theories of everything—I trained to be an English teacher for years before I suffered under a principal who warned me: pronouns are heavy here, and I agreed, though we meant different things, he was telling me to avoid teaching a part of speech. My friend had a hysterectomy before the…

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• Calista Oetama

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