Words, overheard
in garden shops,
uptown and earnest,
blossom into cablegrams
from South Korea
or Cameroon; oleander,
unscented blue star,
becomes
a refugee
from a royal Malaysian family
exhausted
from her long ocean voyage;
gladioli, pale-green
and unblossomed,
in uncertain translation,
become voluminous
and blood-red;
common yellow snapdragons
conjure
the emblazoned railway
embankments
of Bucharest.
Radiant,
reassembled, worlds
arise from colonnades
of cosmos,
from nasturtium
and bloodroot
reshaped on someone’s
traveled tongue:
alyssum
of untold losses,
immigrant grasses
rising between
the floorboards.
Unsettled
and urgent: these
images created by
gardeners
and railway conductors,
shipbuilders and
fruit polishers,
nurturers whose
worlds crest,
broad-leafed
and crimsoned, whose words
offer the chance
to grow fluent in
something
that has no concern
over what meanings
are indigenous.
In August, Mike Puican’s debut book of poetry, Central Air, will be released by Northwestern Press. He has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and New England Review, among others. He won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team, and is past president and long-time board member of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Currently he teaches poetry to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals at the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center and St. Leonard’s House.