Portside

Poem About Flowers

By Cortney Lamar Charleston

You are reading this poem right now.
This poem is nothing more than its words.
There are no tricks to this poem, no cunning ambitions.
There are no hidden messages in this poem.
          Trust me, I can hardly spell subliminal (sp?).
The little black characters on this large white page 
are not metaphors for being black in America.  
These are just words like any others.
Other examples include:
          Other
          Examples
          Include
          The
          Patriot
          Act
          Universal
          Health
          Care
          Stonewall
          Islam
          Dodd
          Frank
          Twitter
          Trayvon
          Martin
          Food
          Desert
          Drones
All of the above are words.
Most of them are nouns: people, places, things, ideas.
          This poem is not about them, not about people, place, things or ideas.   
This poem is not about misogyny.
This poem is not about heteronormativity.
This poem is not about religious persecution.
This poem is not about police brutality.
This poem is not about gun control.
This poem is about what it’s about, about what the words say.
          Better yet, this poem is about what I, the poet, say it’s about.
This poem is about flowers, that’s what I say.
This poem doesn’t need to be interpreted. Dissected. Discussed.
          I’ve already said this is a poem about flowers.
          This poem is about Red roses. White lilies. Blue orchids.

 
Cortney Lamar Charleston is a Cave Canem fellow, finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and semi-finalist for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Iowa Review, The Journal, New England Review, Pleiades, River Styx, Spillway, TriQuarterly and elsewhere.