☄ 

You stagger into a dense patch of brambles, bloody from all the falls, wheezing, collapsing again (audience members boo & heckle), & as your consciousness wanes, you see the fallen petals around you dissolve, & as the pink shreds, as the yellow tatters, each subatomic particle—no longer recognizable as Rose—expands forever away from all the other points, & in your final thought, you see each speck inhabited by life barely perceptible: snotty clouds of translucent spiders, & with you as our lens we see existence unlimited, & whatever our conceptions of plant animal fungi bacteria protozoa chromista, we are wrong — Life/anything, Life/boundless, Life/collision of chaos & infinite time, & now another one of you dies here in the rosebush labyrinth, everyone alive trudges onward, looking for water, food, a safe place to sleep, (the audience continues heckling) again, etc.

☄ 

Handcuff almanac/ 
twine-tied flower pulled to dust/ 
masturbating 
with the palms 
of President 
Loneliness 
you try to 
imagine the 
memory of 
community 
(power)

☄ 

Ripples perceived as bullets, 
you ask, “Have I denied my 
self sexuality?” 
/ 
Misidentified as rose 
truly a field of 
lavender burning 
/ 
perpetual 
personality 
hellfire

Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will never surrender—Benjamin McPherson Ficklin will always love you. They are the author of the novella The West & the collection A Cynical View of Dystopian America. Among various publications of fiction, poetry, & journalism, their work has been recognized in Best Small Fiction 2019 and Best American Essays 2020.