A Poem by HLR

(Im)permanence

I.

He said ‘you must be the only girl in the world
who gets upset whenever she’s given flowers’

& I explained it’s not the bouquets that upset me,
it’s what the flowers mean: they scream temporary

fleeting beauty, something so flagrantly not everlasting
& yet apparently symbolising your perpetual love for me.

They’re an idea of happiness that I watch die slowly, painfully,
over seventy-two hours or five days or another tragic week.

II.

They’re busy dying in the corner while we’re fucking,
trying to create new life of our own & failing.

Those sagging lilies simply mirror my lack
of fecundity. See how the soft pollen drops

so easily from stamen, only to be wiped off
the tabletop, ochre dust hot on my fingertips

that I rub together cruelly, forcing hopeful spores
into a state of obliteration till there’s no hope of more

life left. The filament in every bloom: my fallopian
tubes that don’t function as they’re supposed to.

Stigma protruding from womb, ever-present
even when hidden behind the droop of exhausted petals.

III.

Every shock of colour wrapped in cellophane seems to be
you confidently saying, ‘Here is our love: dying already.’

Every artfully arranged display says, ‘The clock is ticking,’
so mockingly. I smashed every vase in the house

& still you offered me a gathering of already-fading pink
roses in a stolen Stella Artois pint glass. I monitored them

& said, ‘Why are you so intent on reminding me that
everyone and everything I love always leaves me?’

IV.

The symbolism I obsessed over manifested as true:
soon after another negative test, you bagged up our love

& threw it out with the same ease you used to dump
those bunches of supermarket daffodils last spring:

old beauty crumpled in on itself, drowned in stale water,
destined for the compost heap. At least they might

regenerate one day, turn from decay to beauty again.
Unlike us: dead-ended from the moment we were picked.

V.

You bought me a cactus instead one day, unveiled it to me as if
it were a new pet or the longed-for baby, but I still managed

to murder it eventually—absent-mindedly, yes, but I killed it
all the same, through a combination of subconscious spite

& inevitable neglect in the bleak depressive episode
that supressed me when you left. Did I just forget

to water it, or did the succulent kill itself, suicided
in the knowledge that I’m not fit to be a mother?

In those days, nature served solely to remind me
of everything unnatural & ugly about my body.

VI.

How to pick oneself up again after so many deaths? I grieve
daily for the baby I’ll never get to meet & all of the flowers

in my house now are unkillable: faux stems, plastic leaves, silk petals, forever
in bloom—permanent reminders that I survived the impermanence of you.

HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning working-class poet from North London. She is a commended winner of The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition 2021, and she won the Desmond O'Grady International Poetry Competition 2021. HLR’s debut collection History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone) was longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards 2022. Her pamphlet EX-CETERA will be published by Nine Pens in 2023. @HLRwriter