Back to Issue Twenty-One.

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.

 

Annabelle Crowe is a homeschooling senior from Wilmington, North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from diode poetry journal and Asheville Poetry Review, and has been recognized by the Princeton University Poetry Contest for High School Students, the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. She was a student in the 2016 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.

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