by Annalisa Hansford
petrichor

I mistake ache for awe daily. Knew I was shattered since birth.
The hospital walls as white as the bone of my childhood best
friend. How only one of us would live past eighteen. In the maternity
ward, all my mother wanted to hear was silence. My father,
his favorite Sublime song. Instead their ears filled with the wailing
of a newborn. Some grow up to be a disappointment. Others arrive
in this world that way. I learned to dream of the future tense, memories
fresh like a bundle of lavender, girls with poems for faces. Once
I destroyed myself for a girl named after a flower. Now I can’t look
at gardens without thinking about the nightmare of my life that,
no matter what universe, every version of myself wants what
I can’t have. Like a rafflesia in a field waiting to be picked by a stranger
but never is. The stranger is me. I pick the daisy. Bears the name
of a girl that might love me in an alternate universe. But not this one.

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Annalisa Hansford (they/them) is the author of Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts (Bottlecap Press 2025) and their second chapbook Banana Pancakes is forthcoming from Rockwood Press. Their poetry has received honors from the Academy of American Poets and the Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program. They’ve studied poetry with Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Victoria Chang. They previously interned at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, where one of their favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, used to frequent.