Her mother named her White Dahlia, the consequence
of unplanned pregnancy while studying forensics. Or so

she told the boy selling orchids in popcorn bags (he ran out
of sheet music and poetry books). Renaming her Orchid
he’d ram into her all night so their breathing would fog up the
windows, an eternal 21C. A common misconception:

flowers have no bones. He learned what it means to
have a backbone when she broke his fangs
like sugar cubes.

A glass slide is too small a coffin for one convinced she
was “beloved”. The strawberry cigarette ash
should have been the tip-off. Rarely
will a botanist throw their own child under Industry’s wheels.

I sold my soul for a memory of you, one not
even long enough to be recorded

on vinyl and small enough to trap in
the empty pen I used to write

down these words. In a sense you’re now
eternal since souls are boundless and

yours is now my ink. Don’t warn your children
of strangers or drugs, rather of soul buyers

on street corners at 8PM in July. Rejection
itself is enough of a drug.

(Sold/lost: a reverse connotation where one letter
is enough to overlook the mistranslation)

At 5 I was convinced I was
a flower
whose vocation was imitating
their final hysterical
wail
once Winter awoke from its
anorexia.

I pleaded my case with
a botanist
whose seamstress wife consented to stitch
a tutu of Kadupul
flowers,
like a fairy godmother warning of their death at
dawn.

At 16 I finally danced
their goodbye,
petals whisked off as if molted
layers of skin
and only when at the end I stood naked
did the concept of death have
definition.

To girls who dream of being fairy princesses: turn your
balconies into paradise greenhouses, and every
night sing each of the Thumbelinas

to sleep. Frost's flowers crowd beneath my fingers, the
young moon peaking in. I dare not invite you again -
your mind exploded into a nebula last time you saw
so many lights. My tiny Thumbelinas have gotten
married, with Thumbelinas of their won. I kiss
their frostbitten flowers awake. I promised. Blue
fingertips have become a norm, a childhood
reminder of a wish for blue blood. It thaws

outside. Wee Thumbelinas weep. The ferns
unfurl. My lullabies make plants awaken, not from the
beauty, but of dying loyalty.

Never cook with a fairy tale omnibus
open on a kitchen table,
or confuse salt with sugar.

Cherry-pit pies are like eating dragon bones, as to
be expected of one taught to
        never cook with a fairy tale omnibus,

safer to love a beast than to open up to
strangers, precise butchers cutting hearts
        open on a kitchen table;

I love you like salt, preach obedient daughters, omitting
the ease to mix dream with wake
        or confuse salt with sugar.

one of the gifts for your birthday was
nonexistent constellations etched in your skin
cascading down your shoulders evoking
subdued squirms
        my ever gallant one

I swore they'd guide you home
these nebulas of crooked flora dusted
with sugary swirls of the Milky Way
a biblical formula of unquestionable permanence
        but

it was I who followed the ink which
washed down your drain
through sewers out to sea
        it was permanence
        shelter
        which skin couldn't give
and in those lullabies the ocean sang I
saw the stars clearer
        a better map than all your body combined
        could ever give to cure cosmic wanderlust