To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Poetry Box is sharing a Poem-of-the-Day, selected from various anthologies and individual poet collections that we have published over the years.
Please enjoy today’s selection: “No, It’s Called Flower” by Judith Skillman, which appears in The Poeming Pigeon: Doobie or Not Doobie:
No, It’s Called Flower
Not weed, I was told
by the young man
behind the counter.
Weed is seen in a bad light,
he explained, for its connotations.
Flower—here he gestured
at thick buds of Kush,
Strawberry Pie, and Diesel
fi lling glass jars,
spilling their scent
into the room, arrayed
in shades of verdant green,
huge buds horny as hell
for what they’d been deprived of.
—Flower is pretty, more acceptable.
I applaud your rebranding,
I said, the question
of how to inhale
without burning my throat
still there on my lips, unasked.
