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Bad Flowers

Bad Flowers

A poem by
Laura McCullough

In the dark, the smell of flowers
invades when I least expect it,
like little kisses on my cheek hollows
or on the curve of jaw betraying

one small vein — underneath this, it admits,
I am alive and something is working —
the signifier, this one blue line, like a stamen
jutting erect and powdery from its bowl

of petals. Don't believe this: bad flowers?
Betraying kiss? Small vein? The gyre,
sliding out of ourselves into the blue-black
lake of consciousness; we are not alone.

This helix divides and flowers break
attracting bees to do their job.
This is not a riddle. Flowers are bad.
Kisses do betray. Veins are importantly

unimportant in the schematic of the whole,
and through each must pass the small,
and if those elements could not pass,
if that bee was not attracted, if that kiss

did not occur, what grief will not be allowed,
what flowering of your life won't blossom,
or die into the next phase, the sting of this
the fare for where you must finally arrive.

Copyright 2006 by Laura McCullough

Laura McCullough Laura writes:
This poem — about self and identity — is also in the first section of my second manuscript of poetry, Mirror Neuron (unpublished). I was re-reading Baudelaire and this is my nod to Fleurs du Mal.

Laura McCullough graduated with a BA from The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, and holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard College. She has been a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellow, won a Geraldine R. Dodge Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at the Nebraska Summer Writers Workshop. She attended the 2005 Bread Loaf writers conference as a contributor. Laura has published poems widely in literary magazines and journals such as Nimrod, Potion, Hotel Amerika, Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Iron Horse Quarterly, Boulevard, The God Particle, Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, Tarpaulin Sky, and others. Her first collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, was published in February, 2006 by Open Book Press with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn, Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. She delivered a paper, “In Defence of Shelley: the New Science of Mirror Neurons and its Implications for a Theory of Poetics” at The Mid American’s 2005 Winter Wheat Writing Festival in Bowling Green. She is a professor of writing at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey, where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series. Laura can be reached via email at: lmccullough@brookdalecc.edu.

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