For a week we hold space around a single daffodil in our garden. I bring in the newspaper
under my jacket so it won’t see One Mass Shooting a Week in the U.S.//Purse & Pistol Bingo
Saves a Small Town//Wrong Door Shooting Reopens Questions About Racism. We whisper, it’s
snowing, as if our shriveling yellow blossom might hear, doesn’t know. Then a team of
surveyors shows up and plants about a hundred red and yellow flags in moldy grass they’ll dig
up to bury fiber optic cable, so the street is flapping and twirling with color, our daffodil is going
limp from the cold, and I’m wondering what we’ll do tomorrow if we’re not tending our little
lighthouse and believing bodies won’t fall, boats won’t crash, and every bird will understand
glass.

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Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems, essays, and reviews appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, and Mid-American Review, among other journals. Diane is a holistic life coach with emphasis in creativity practice, and she teaches writing at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com.

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