Superbloom

They say April showers bring May flowers, so this is a collection of flowers from our personal garden, the archive. Superbloom gathers voices rooted in nature, memory, and rebirth. Each poem unfolds like a petal, fragile yet insistent, blooming from grief, joy, and longing. This collection celebrates life’s tenacity and transience, offering a garden of resilience where even the smallest flower speaks to beauty, survival, and the sacred in the everyday.

The Hour of Peonies

Barbara Crooker

The Buddha says, “Breathing in, I know I am here in my body.

Breathing out, I smile to my body,” and here I am, mid-span,

a full figured woman who could have posed for Renoir.

When I die, I want you to plant peonies for me, so each May,

my body will resurrect itself in these opulent blooms, one of les Baigneuses,

an amplitude of flesh, luxe, calme et volupté. And so are these flowers,

an exuberance of cream, pink, raspberry, not a shrinking violet among them.

They splurge, they don’t hold back, they spend it all.

When Renoir was painting at the end, he was confined to a wheelchair

with paintbrushes strapped to his arthritic hands. Still he said, “the limpidity of the flesh,

one wants to caress it.” Even after the petals have fallen, the lawn is full of snow,

the last act in Swan Lake where the corps de ballet, in their feathered tutus,

kneel and kiss the ground, cover it in light.

pg 177 issue 27-28

pg 32 issue 6

Lazarus in the Garden

Geri Rosenzweig

Moving through the garden that came to fullness 

while he was elsewhere, he takes on the dazed look 

of one sent back to learn the landscape again, by heart.

Blue irises in the space he made for them 

by thinning out wild bee balm before he left, 

finches gorge on the cone flower, the heart of the flower

agrees to its ruin in a quick winnowing of seeds.

He sways lightly in the unaccustomed air like the bronze lily 

that returns every other year from the underworld.

No one will convince him that the river is not a god scattering 

evening’s rose tinted shawls on the river.

It will take days to accept as true the many rooms 

of his house, their yellow walls trembling with light.

PI 10 p.56

At Victor’s cabin

Paola Loreto

There’s an air of grass, tonight

that comes from afar

and brings me back to the moment

wholly, of when I was a girl

in a meadow: when

the world was a promise

as was the life

that was answered.

PI 29

Translated from the Italian by Hailey Gross

The Meanest Flower

Mimi Khalvati

I travel with aubretia, pansy, poppy,

seed anywhere and don’t look back.

Let any wind sow me, any rough patch be

my home between the cracks.

Forget-me-not call me, if only, if only

memory grew in my tracks.

I blow at a window, away on a balcony,

straggle in moss round chimneystacks.

The child who stoops to examine me

—my stars, my spin of the zodiac—

will see, for every star in the galaxy,

there’s one in the broken tarmac.

Give me a bombsite, wasteground, masonry,

fragment of history I’d otherwise lack.

Shallow my roots, sweet my taxonomy:

chickweed, speedwell, stonecrop, toadflax.

PI 27-28, pg. 183

Cactuses and Orchids

Моком Zeqo

Cactuses are grotesque plants, 

menacing with their spines.

They’re your absence, 

where the wind is wounded.

Orchids—fragments of the sun,

small fires of nostalgia that rise over the sea.

They are my cry 

that makes death deaf.

—translated by Wayne Miller and Moikom Zeqo from Albanian

PI #29 pg. 72

The honeycomb is made from flowers

Carol Frost

and the materials for wax bees gather

from the resinous gum of trees,

while honey is distilled from dew.

At the rising of the constellations

or when a rainbow is in the sky,

the dew is deposited in the comb.

Dew from sweet-tasted flowers.

This, mother, is my song for you

pretending to sleep with open eyes.

As odor and dance lead bees to nectar,

though you’re far away I will come to you.

1. #17 P.228

Whitethorn

Jacqueline Osherow

As always, when I see it, my first thought:

some kids’ discarded tissues, helped by wind,

have scattered in the hedge, caught on thorns, not

look! winter’s finally at an end

not this is what it means to bloom for whitethorn. 

It’s my greatest failing. I never learn

or rather, don’t apply the things I know,

which is why I have so little to show

for my quickly coming up on fifty years.

But who wants to know that spring is tatters

of dingy whiteness clinging to briar?

Can’t just one bush blaze with fire—

for a single instant – that does not consume?

Or is this my vision? this stingy bloom?

PI #20/21 2015, P.253

Night And Morning Of Spring

Hai Zi

At night
I carry ancient roots
to the field
Green frog legs, green sockets of the moon
and a green bullet shell
all bloom
on my back

In the morning
I return to the village
knock at the door
A bee looking for water
lands on my neck
thinks I might be
a well above the ground
Mother opens the door
and sees through the well
a roll of moist trees
all kneel down
bow to the plain and to her:
Mother – they cry –
Mother

Translated by Ye Chun

Seed I

Anna Gual

Between the light and the stone,
the microorganism
that resembles you.

You find a magnifying glass and close in:
her gaze is yours.
Flesh of your flesh.

No one can deny,
other than your great grandmother,
the crops of wheat
and the flakes of straw
that gathered in her hair
one hundred and thirty years ago.

She’s now a microscopic being
that breathes. Nothing else.

To breathe after death.

We will breathe after death.

Pulse

Fady Joudah

13.

In paradise, hospital bed

Sit under ageless

Mahogany and sycamore that bear

Every kind of fruit.

Hot meals are autumn leaves,

Branches are waitress arms

And also poles for drips

In your mouth from bills

Of surgical precision.

For Aspirin the swallow.

For Benadryl the nightingale.

No harm befalls you.

The roots will sense your ailment.

The flowers will scan your organs.

Geranium for the spleen,

Poppies for the brain,

And where there’s a latrine,

A jasmine vine will blossom.

PI 13/14 2009, pp.60