It’s not goldenrod that makes you sneeze.
It’s the ragweed that hides among the bright yellow.
Ragweed’s small green bloom. Nothing is what you think.
Who knows why people want to shoot other people?
You can speculate all day from inside your mind.
You can blame the most flagrant. It’s me! It’s me!
it shouts suspiciously. It craves notice even
for its supposed bad. The condition of your nose
may just be your inheritance. There was your father,
lying with his head over the edge of the bed, dripping
Neo-Synephrine into each nostril. Every day,
Neo-Synephrine for the terrible losses, the angers.
Goldenrod is good for inflammation, kidney problems,
gout, muscle spasms. The world is rich with pollen,
moving into the clearings. It wants to go on propagating.
You are living inside the flying yellow. It colors your skin
with grit. You thought you could make things be
a certain way. You thought one thing was bad and
another good. You ask for a remedy and you get this
ridiculous entanglement, butterflies over all of it.
Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (Ohio), won the Hollis Summers Prize. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize. Her new memoir, Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State), is a Midwest Book Award winner.
