Ferns
A poem by Cara Dorris
School taught you they’re sad plants,
the only tissued ones
to never seed or flower,
never bloom.
When spring began,
in all its fast and surging urgency,
you watched that girl who sang by the pool.
You waited for your stem to spore longing.
For your spiny-leaved chest
to heave against the rock
inside it.
In spring
you tried to love him less.
You waited for the fern flowers every year.
On Ivan Kupala Day,
your Russian grandmother
told you to search with her,
and you fell into the soil
still wet with rain.
Your fingers rose and dug
in their broken chord arpeggio,
but your arms were left dirt-spattered.
Cold fingers shook
for what you couldn’t find.
You waited, you keep waiting
for your fingertips
to itch for breasts
and mouth to crave
pink lips.
The tongue like burnt honey
or guilt.
Cara Dorris is 16 years old. She was born in 1993 in Cromwell, Connecticut and currently lives in Glastonbury, CT
I wish I had been writing poetry like that when I was 16
I second that.