by Chrissy Stegman

Yesterday, I was unbuttoning
the tulip poplars. Taking off their alien flowers.
I held them like courthouse
cufflinks and dropped the blossoms of
wet evidence in the late spring grass.
I had worn cheap mascara to the clean-towel-side of
the Theater District where taxi doors breathed
open and shut like lungs. I walked up the street
where I had been the rain earlier.
Juliet was already horizontal
backstage, pinned beneath silk and hot pink
municipal flowers. Her beauty had
the stunned look of love taxidermied.
Romeo lifted a hand and the lights
held it the way water holds the copper mouth of
a garden spigot. Nobody whispered
that tragedy was gainful
employment. I was tired of theater
but I still caught the clock at 1:11, rushed to
my train, my arms raised in the afternoon air.
Outside, a maple tree performed its pollinating
crash scene to the sidewalk. I shot my eyes
to a vulture working the air with a red tongue
thread-tied to the throat of the sky.
Later, on the commuter road, I slammed my head
into the memory of the tulip poplar flowers.
Their odd orange and green
which struck the windshield of me
like rumors of some distant
powdered mountain.

Chrissy Stegman lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, MER, Michigan Quarterly Review, ONE ART, Rattle, River Heron Review, and Gargoyle, among others. She is a 2025 MVICW Fellow and winner of the 2025 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize. She has received three Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.