Wildflowers by Emily Strempler
Her body lies beneath the meadow rue
A prairie horizon blossoming at her toes
For her, the long grass whispers,
“Take me back to the birch bark grove
Where the trees stretch skyward, slender
And the ground is soft in spring
You, my twilight lover
Are the first frost
Soft shadow over trembling aspen
Lay me in that old familiar soil
Sow me a field of wildflowers
When you remember my name
Tell yourself
It was always
Yours to keep”
“I scrapped this poem because, for a long time, it was the single neglected poem in my submissions roster. I wrote it in a flurry of heartfelt enthusiasm and put an enormous amount of effort into the environmental metaphors, hoping to evoke the rural Manitoba of my childhood. But, since I don't normally write poems, I didn't know what to do with it, and then, before I knew it, it was old and didn't meet my standards anymore.”
Emily Strempler (she/her) is a queer, (White) German-Canadian, ex-fundamentalist writer of inconvenient fiction. Raised in a deeply conservative prairie community, she married at eighteen before leaving the church and moving out west. She is an intersectional-feminist, anti-colonist, and abolitionist. You can find her on Twitter @EmilyStrempler and Instagram @estrempler.