I Buy My Monster Roses
Though the people on the internet help too.
They send money by pressing a small button
on their screens. It would be disingenuous
to claim all the credit—we can’t heal
or hurt alone. I sniff the tops of the rose heads
like a newborn’s scalp—fresh skin and hair
only a few days picked. I try to arrange the flowers
on my bed, create a romantic scene
like all the 90s rom-coms I still watch. I’m stuck
in the past, I know. I’m stuck in the present,
I know that too. I thought the roses
could be a cure, and maybe in a small way
they were, each petal I plucked so gently
from the stems gave in to me.
Copyright © 2022 by Diannely Antigua. This poem appeared in Waxwing Literary Journal, Fall 2022. Used with permission of the author.
Diannely Antigua
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship. She received her MFA at New York University, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy.
Antigua is the author of Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024) and Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award.