Your bitter words make me
want to burn my tongue with tar.
It won't be these cigarettes that **** me-
but my family's words.

With your breath heavy from whiskey
you were never good after drinking a bottle.
Hot tears fall as you tell me to grow up.
I can't.

I keep
crushing my sunflowers in my palm.
Bleeding yellow and green earth
through white knuckles.
A gold that once littered our bedroom floor
between the articles of clothing.

I keep
praying for rain to quench the soil
but there's only deathly heat.
Apologies to the gods go unheard.

No one wants to listen to a girl crying
that her flowers are dead from the doing of her own hands.