midas
BY ANNABELLE CROWE
I’ve bitten the flowers; every bloom
in my garden’s genuine.
I can’t understand these vaults
within them. Thumb their faces,
find a thin bright dust like pollen
or the pigment of a moth’s wing.
Mating colors. Scales. I don’t know.
Some remnant of transformation.
They say you can’t reduce the world
to weights & measures,
but when Archimedes placed
that golden crown in his bathtub—
Eureka—water’s tangible
displacement. He ran wild
through the city, joyous, naked.
I can’t stop touching myself.