Against Daylilies

Parking lot perennial. Predictable serial killer.
Your gladness peoples the concrete corners 
of big box shops as you sit, stalwart, atop 

the gritty digs in which your tubers finger 
sad dirt for nutrients, your orange mouths
open their baby bird craws, suck up exhaust,

as shopping carts racket by windowless vans. 
I don’t like how I dig you up again and again 
but fail to grasp all your knotty bits that seem 

to have found it in their will to sprout again.
I did what the gardening center man said 
I should do to you, threw you into a roadside 

ditch, where he promised no one would spy 
your flames, where no drive-by audience would 
bother to ogle those baubles you call petals.

To think I used to serve you up in the vase
I place at center of my table, loving how you 
managed to dial up suns in nowhere zones; 

to think I used to eat breakfast within inches 
of your scent, speckled and tigery-breathed. 
But I’ve smoked so long I can no longer feel 

the effect of your musk breath, and I can eat 
the color orange in an egg, and eat any man’s
peculiar stare by closing my eye on it like 

a mouth. The most interesting thing about 
Ted Bundy, in my opinion, is that he was so 
boring journalists came to dread talking to him.

ξ

Cate Marvin's fourth book of poems, Event Horizon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2022. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches poetry writing for the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA Program, and is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She lives in Maine.