By Catie Rosemurgy

Featured Art: A Bouquet of Flowers by Clara Peters

It’s OK to feel important.

The swelling between our legs
indicates we are the rarest of flowers.

We bloom in only the most
idiosyncratic conditions: rubber,

misery, great shoes. The other day

I realized that we can’t spit
without hitting grass or something else

that implies the necessity
of our experience, of our greatness.

We can control what we want to grow in our yards.

We have developed capillaries shaped like ferns
shaped like trees shaped like lightning

shaped like math shaped like . . .

What more is there to say? Nothing, but, my god,
listen to us. The whole sky was the inspiration

for our hearts—otherwise, we wouldn’t have
such dark hearts.

The obvious tinyness of the stars

is even better proof. Almost all our books argue
that even those footnotes, even those glints

off the night’s teeth are bigger than us.
Tell me, who else but the enormous

could risk writing such books?

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Catie Rosemurgy lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and teaches creative writing at the College of New Jersey. Her poetry collection, My Favorite Apocalypse, was published by Graywolf Press. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Female Writers and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship.

Originally appeared in NOR 3