The Roses You Didn't Send

The roses I remember most are the ones you didn't send. The birthday you forgot. The anniversary that fell on a Tuesday and Tuesdays, apparently, are exempt from love. But this poem is not about you. This poem is about roses. A rose is the world's laziest metaphor. Every poet has used it. Every Valentine has leaned on it. Every apology has hidden behind its twelve red soldiers arranged in guilt. And yet. I planted roses in my mother's garden the spring after she died. Not because she asked. Because she would have. And the difference between those two things is the entire definition of grief: doing what they would have wanted because they can no longer want it. The roses came back every year. I didn't expect that. I thought grief was a one-time planting but it turns out it's perennial— it returns, it blooms, it hurts, and then it sleeps and you think it's over and then: spring. A rose is not lazy. A rose is the only flower that comes with a warning: beauty and pain in the same stem. Handled correctly, it's the most beautiful thing in the room. Handled wrong, it draws blood. Sounds like love. Sounds like grief. Sounds like the thing that grows no matter what.