The neighbor’s sunflowers are
house-high, head-heavy, stooped
at the stalk, peering down like

benevolent gods, two thousand
seed-small eyes blinking kindly
from their broad faces, golden

manes still brilliant in their wilt,
leaves splayed wide in welcome of
a season that will usher them out.

I am built in their image—
a slackening of stem and tendon,
weary crook of the neck—

months of swelter, years of strain
making tenuous monuments of bodies
teetering between grace and give.

But I’ve never been so elegant in my
undoing, the sag of my limbs ungainly,
no air of the divine in my prostration.

What allows a creature wrestling with
the weight of their own being to remain
so radiant, so nobly bent toward their end?

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Zoe Boyer was raised in Evanston, Illinois on the shore of Lake Michigan, and completed her MA in creative writing among the ponderosa pines in Prescott, Arizona. Her work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, RockPaperPoem, Poetry South, Kelp Journal, Plainsongs, About Place, West Trade Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Penn Review, and Pleiades, and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

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