Parker Logan
Image by Jill Burrow from Pexels
Parker Logan is originally from Orlando, Florida but currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His work can be found in Split Lip, Ghost City Review, and is forthcoming in Gulf Coast and Pleiades. He is the 2023 winner of the Yellowwood Poetry Prize selected by CT Salazar from the Yalobusha Review and the current EIC of the New Delta Review.
Watching the Lily Bloom
I delivered floral arrangements to every mother
in north Florida that year, that year of corner stores
and Publix sandwiches, that summer of sticking
needles in my arm with Miss Tammy. Her track marks
were prodigious. They loved her at the blood bank,
they loved her at the gardening center, everyone listened
when she told them her body had prolapsed.
That was the year I lived in the shack, the year
of crape myrtles and Real Housewives and oysters
and Tallahassee. O Tallahassee. I hate you, Tallahassee.
Your green hills, your rivers, and your lakes disgust me.
Don’t fall in love, Tammy told me, with anybody from Tallahassee,
don’t fall in love with Tallahassee, Tallahassee
on my tongue, dancing from the T to the L, like a cave
on the H, and O say can you see the capitol building,
like a finger in the air all summer long, that year
I gave my heart to a place cut up by a train track,
that summer of fireworks in the park and flamingos
on my beach towel, Miss Tammy at the Stop N’ Shop
and her little lily plant that was dying in its sill,
its green leaves browning while she laughed.
How do I keep this thing alive? she asked me.
I don’t know how to keep anything living.
I don’t know anything except water and light.
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