Serving House: A Journal of Literary Arts
SHJ
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Poem
SHJ Issue 16
Spring 2017

Carriers

by Joyce Miller

If we were flowers

	germ lineage tucked inside our tissues
	awaiting bee hunger
	the sneeze of the wind
	the skeletal legginess of beetles

Contact would be chance

	pollinating
	a third-party vibration
	of dispersals seeking shelter
	in ovules.

Laden languidly, blur rubbed to net,

	a receptive, exposed stigma
	tipped sticky with fingers that swell
	into phallic depositors, would arrow
	double-wombing embryo and endosperm.

How easy an abstraction

	of air, a new generation
	born of a season’s trance
	for pink-lipped blooms
	to open.

 

SHJ Issue 16
Spring 2017

Joyce Miller

is a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry, senior editorial assistant at The Cincinnati Review, and an adjunct instructor of Italian at the University of Cincinnati.


“...we have been born here to witness and celebrate. We wonder at our purpose for living. Our purpose
is to perceive the fantastic. Why have a universe if there is no audience?” — Ray Bradbury