She buries her nose and inhales the sweetest scent of a cluster. Plucking gently, then gathers a bouquet of branches full of buds in the teal vase, half full with the river’s water. They rest on the kitchen counter, perfuming the room where her mother stacked Japanese bamboo dishes soon after the wedding. In the room where he first blessed the house that they bought with a kiss on her lips.
In the room where she peeled robust eggplants, carrots, red radishes and stirred in legumes. Sprinkled paprika, cumin, turmeric in their spring stews. Purple lilacs fused the room, witnessing their bodies clung together. His hands at her waist, her spine creating an arc like a rainbow in the sky as he bent her backwards, and only the silver shadow of the sun between them.
She remembers the view of the sunny kitchen through yellow laced curtains. The curious lilac tree peeking from outside the window like her mother did from time to time sitting on the wrap around porch of her first home. Listening to the constant humming of crickets. Eyes tracking the zig-zag flutter of butterfly wings and dragonflies.
She remembers the children they talked about her nursing. The ones they named Amelia, Crocus, Silvie, Baldwin that they never had year after year. Then, they didn’t know who to blame, the expert doctors at the fertility clinic one-hundred-fifty miles away. They didn’t know what to blame her cervix, uterus, eggs, fallopian tubes, or millions of his moonbeams. She remembers the scent of lilacs that followed them passing each other in the kitchen. Now, she gathers them to last a few days. They spread apart in the teal oblong vase with the river’s water.
Jerrice J Baptiste is a poet, author of nine books. Her most recent book, Coral in The Diaspora, was published by Abode Press (August 2024). She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize by Jerry Jazz Musician 2024 & Abode Press 2025 and for Best of the Net in 2022 by Bluestem. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in One Art: Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry, The Write Launch, The Banyan Review, The Yale Review, and hundreds of others. She facilitates poetry as a returning teaching artist at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. Her poems & collaborative songwriting are featured on the Grammy nominated album-Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti.