the first summer storm, starlings claim both suet cakes

Sophia Peng

you left out for the baby hummingbirds. they’re selling

a new glp-1 on tv while we wait

for the chickpeas to come out of the air fryer, and i don’t tell you

but it will sink me if the primroses

don’t grow, just absolutely tank me

before clinicals start. how you break up

and not talk about it confuses me. But in the past year

i’ve been taught all the best ways

to approach a suffering thing, so we sit

until the movie comes back on & you let me

make you chamomile tea. i don’t mention the crumpled kroger receipt

under the mat stiffened with salt, or the sluggish stillness

i’ve somehow found now that my club roster is full

and my friends know my secrets and

a cat makes his home against my collarbone.

these things without association

in your mind. thunder & the repulsive

press of pollen. geese

soaked flightless, clumped like wet lashes where road

meets the huron. good enough, with my head out the screen door

& soil tipping the planters, patio lights slippery through puddles

beneath. i’d meant to hang them up, but—

there’s a scene to it, all sparking and sopping

and guileless.

since i started medical school,

Sophia Peng

i’ve developed a ferocious fascination

with flowers. counting

their petals. sticking my fingers

through their rubbery stems.

rolling the milky fluid that leaks

on the pad of my notetaking thumb

& making wishes on buds ripped

too soon from their leaves.

i trample the woods with my precocity,

my white-collared edge;

i dare the lake at the end of the trail

to enchant me

the way a bluesky day in june used to

drench me in magic.

which is to say

a vein is what lies 45 degrees horizontal

of the approaching needle,

and so my wants have narrowed

to the tools in my hands.

i get too close to the blackbird and its

bright wings.

i seed and froth with the weeds in the pond,

agitated beneath a glaring sun.

there is no world beyond hurt;

only those who get in the way

of its reckoning. i think about the horses whose photos

i gleefully pawed as a kid,

blood and bone blurred to streams of ink in the sunset,

a bare hint beyond mortality.

when do they feel

the cage of skin that is living?

i stare at the bits of green

dotting my palms after having rubbed clean

a field of wild geraniums;

how stunning to know i hold the cells of beings—

and how startling to remember at once

the brilliance of the saddle

and the brokenness of their teeth.