Magnolias

I missed the magnolia bloom. Little lavender boats that set sail from the sinuous branch of spring, one week only. Elusive slivers of endive at the Japanese restaurant behind Walter’s on DeKalb I didn’t know existed. You enter through a black door in a dark hallway where people stand to wait for the john. I can’t see a thing in the dark. “Their brief life teaches us to live,” writes Maria Popova, and I consider how they might be Jesus opening his arms just as I leave to move Mom into the home. I arrive in time for Easter dinner with the family—ham loaves—as is our tradition, entirely unrelated to the loaves Jesus multiplied for the hungry masses. We crave the sauce, my mother’s recipe, the way it hints of piña colada, the useless toothpick umbrella. After a week, the petals brown and fall like over-ripe banana peels on the sidewalk. On the way home from Peck’s, I pass the lawn service guys and their leaf blower racket, takeout bag in my hand. What comes next, I wonder. If time is a construct, then magnolias must be budding somewhere right this moment, pointing their juicy fingers, oblivious, resolute. 

KAREN HILDEBRAND

Karen Hildebrand is the author of Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). Recent poems appear in Anti-Heroin Chic, Braving the Body, LEON, Mom Egg Review, No Dear, Pigeon Pages, Rust+Moth, Scoundrel Time, Slipstream, Swannanoa Review, and SWWIM. Her dance criticism appears in The Brooklyn Rail and Fjord Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.