Holding on to dead flowers

waiting to disintegrate beneath grip.

You didn’t realize it.

I plucked my body from our family tree.

Branched into the distance where I wrote

an ode to diminish tight breaths of apprehension,

an elegy to name the tension, a lengthened sigh,

a eulogy when the rickety bundle

dropped like paper to the ground.

Earth eating petals, a beige-brown-pink.

Black is at once death

and the richest soil,

crawling with potential.