You’ll imagine us picking flowers
together: gardenias and lilacs, dandelions,
tiny violets, a spear of purple iris

from the neighbor’s yard—you learning
from me how to hold the stems, a blade
of grass clutched in your baby fist, ready—

you’ll dream me holding you to my chest,
and hum for me a song to thread these spaces
shut:       the day I lock the front door,

and your mother finds me dead;
a daisy’s new-spring veins
about to meet your tiny hand.

–Morgan Adams,
In Nonestica (2013), Accents Publishing

Morgan Adams was born and raised in a bookstore in Lexington, Kentucky and wrote her own first “book” at the age of five. She graduated from Berea College and earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Indiana University. Her work often draws upon myth, folklore, and family history.