(Or “Everybody Has Poppies But Me”)
Read Time: 01:08
There’s no need for a wild hillside because the poppies are in the city streets
Rooting in crevices and fissures in concrete. Gray-green plumage cascades on steps,
And they bloom romantically through the rocks under the MUNI tracks.
They grow in places we think inhospitable, proving that life is not impossible.
The poppies, they grow.
They goddamn grow.
The daylight crowns them and they glow.
You can’t tell me another thing that rivals that orange happiness.
That color lifts your goddamn heart and you can’t rhyme it either.
All is hopeless, but there’s those poppies.
So I wanted those poppies, too.
I wanted that surprising color, that grow-anywhere-no-matter-what-joy.
So I bought what would turn out to be an overbearing amount of seed.
And when mom asked, I told her what was bothering me:
I want poppies, mom. Everybody has poppies. So what did I do? To get the poppies?
I bought the seeds, and I threw them out everywhere in the yard. Everywhere.
By the Itoh Peony, under the Pear tree, as an understory to the dinnerplate dahlias—
The seeds were so small and there was so many of ’em, mom. Everywhere, I mean.
But so two, three weeks later, there were so many crowded seedlings
In this shit-sad-sand-for-soil-substitute here, so close to the beach,
That they all died. It was too much. I put too much, mom.
And so everybody has poppies but me, I told her. Everybody.
Well you might have known, she said.
They never grow anywhere cultivated.
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