Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
The Flower Tombstone
By Megan Baxter

Throat sweet with pollen, petals rotate out from the wheel spokes, fanning the stone. A granite flower for the carbon bones. In the summer, the boys who cut the grass cut the wildflowers too, tear them in the blades of mowers. And no one leaves flowers on this grave anymore, it is old enough to face away from the road, into the tangle of vines and birch. One flower sustains the grief, one flower, like a face, like a heavinly light holds the stone to the death of the body. Was the woman lovely? A flower, a rose, sweet throat and limbs like petals, perfect in symmetry, that sort of designed elegance, the grace of a curved spine, the drooping eyelids and heavy breasts. In the pasture of the dead she grows there, god-like, moving with the wind. Wild Rose, blue Aster, sweet Lily, black-eyed Susan.