Magnolias by Maggie Smith

 

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Magnolias

By Maggie Smith

Another trick spring, another month of mothering
the neighbor’s dumb magnolias from my window.

Another March spent warning, willing their velvet purses
shut with only my mind, because I don’t speak

their language, and because they are not mine
to mother. I have no trees, not even a houseplant,

of my own. The first thing I kept alive was a child.
Talk about a high-stakes dry run. Today that child

is at school, and I am chiding the neighbor’s twin
magnolias with my eyes—don’t open, remember, this spring

isn’t spring at all. But every year their pink tongues
lap snow, lick the thin, cold air. These trees

have seen my son, head back, mouth open,
doing just that. The sun is shining, its warmth

through glass a kind of lie, and I am practicing
telepathy with trees who can’t hear me, again,
.
or they can, but I’m too late: a handful of soft gray
clutches are unclasped on the lawn, empty.

Maggie Smith is the author of Weep Up (Tupelo Press, September 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison; Lamp of the Body; and three prizewinning chapbooks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2017, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Smith is a freelance writer and editor.

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