The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Sally Rosen Kindred's "Book of Asters"

Sunflowers

Skinflowers, unbelievers, turning
away from cool earth: seven years I have been
a mother. Seven years I have followed

strange light, needing your appetites, needing
my skin made gold.
You steam in the fields.

Your mean shine stands
and withstands sleep’s hungers. My legs
move white and weak

against your fleshy sugars. I must learn
to lie down in your rages, to roll
from the lies of sleep. I must hold

myself to summer wide.
Now you swim in the field’s
sudden wings, flight your beloved, your next

terror. Angry saints, my sons love
how you burn. Swing your poison badges
toward the closest star.

This selection comes from Sally Rosen Kindred’s book Book of Asters, available from Mayapple Press. Purchase your copy here!

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of No Eden (2011) and Book of Asters (2014), poetry books from Mayapple Press, and the chapbook Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). She has received two poetry awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Best New Poets 2009, Quarterly West, and on Verse Daily. For more information, please go to http://www.sallyrosenkindred.com/.

Donna Vorreyer is the author ofA House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as six chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks forthcoming in April. She is an assistant poetry editor for Extract(s), and her second collection is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016.