She’s born under a broccoli leaf delivered by the hermit next door the pills I take transform his voice to an abacus of inaudible words the white-gold sky bursts open like a boy in love I’m too high to know if I’m holding my daughter or a sea bass her mouth is dramatic and I swear she has scales! Everything glitters— the garden, the clouds, her skin Manuel’s strange and sudden wings He must have flown me home for when I wake, sunset blooms in the garden of our wallpaper Flora sleeps still as a pinned butterfly Manuelzinho snores gently exhausted by fatherhood I was not built to hold this much love
Flora
From Manuelzinho.
The Poems