12 Ways of Looking at a Sunflower
by Brianna Pike
鈥淚鈥檓 categorically keeping those sunflowers of mine,鈥 Vincent Van Gogh I paint you loose, severed from long stalks displayed flat, looking out instead of up. I paint you cowering one behind the other, knowing you will never know the sun again; I paint you open, dark seeded then picked clean by crows cawing over broken wheat fields. I paint you as sheared mane. I paint you as broken tail. But you are not meant to lay flat, wilting over wood, so I paint you among cabbage roses, carnations, a tangle of wildflowers, but your brown eyes dull, so I paint you as sea anemones, swaying ink blue; stars in my beloved night sky, heavy petals weeping the table white. I paint you in yellow so bright it feels as if I have stolen the sun from you, like a god, and smeared it across my canvas. I paint you again, and again, and again, and again. Each petal, each rough stalk, each soft leaf, each dark seed roots in my heart, so when you are stolen from me, packed up quickly under the arm of a man I once thought my friend, a man who fled in the middle of the night, his sweat wetting the canvases under his arms, I know I need only to return to the fields to find you fresh and shining and stretching toward our sun.
Brianna Pike is a Professor of English at Ivy Tech Community College. Her poems and essays have appeared in Parentheses, Fish Barrel Review, Writer鈥檚 Resist, Juxtaprose, Thimble & The Account. She currently serves as an Editorial Assistant for the Indianapolis Review鈥 and lives in Indy with her husband & son. She blogs at . Find her on Instagram @Bri33081.