I remember a flower,
white like death,
white like the snowflake
barely held aloft
by green sinew of limb,
fighting the urge
to kiss the ground
and melt.
Its petals soft,
lover soft,
a kiss under a twilit azure,
an empty mirror of sky above
beginning to blink from its slumber,
a thousand tiny spider eyes gazing down,
gaseous behemoths
spilling spark and flame
and life into the empty, which
ever remains
mostly empty,
the great silver eye staring calmly,
milky and pupil-less,
unblinking in its dull gaze
as it watched the shadows mingle.
and the flower watching too,
and laughing, if it could do such a thing,
at all the foolish
talking flowers
uprooting themselves to dance
in circles, sprinkling their brazen tears
upon the warm earthen blanket
that was once their home.
Imagine for a moment that you are a bowl of fruit. All you want to do is share your fruit with everyone, but you can’t. You are only a bowl of fruit. You do not have the technology for such a feat. So instead you write poems about your fruit, hoping that someone will be stirred to crave the real thing. Now imagine Joe Nicholas is a bowl of fruit. Joe Nicholas is a bowl of fruit. He is a wine, feline, and broccoli enthusiast with work published or forthcoming in Dead Flowers, Emerge Literary Journal, Willard & Maple, Star*Line, and various haiku journals. He hopes you enjoy his fruit. (joenicholas711.wix.com/joenicholas)