She arrives in a crowd,
points out to me in a voice needing new batteries
that everyone else here smiles with their eyes.
Say you have a headache, she tells me.

She sends me letters in the dead of night,
when the house could be leagues underwater.
This is the way it’s supposed to be, she writes,
this is the way you’re supposed to feel.

Her penmanship is flawless.
Her letterhead’s like mist.
She makes me think of uncracked eggs;
of trees falling silent in forests.

One morning in April she flies me to Keukenhof.
Look, she says, they feel it too,
so far from alone, yet so consumed
with their own blooming.

Study each one in turn; see how its stamens are held high?
I don’t reply. My head is too full of colour,
a community of petals,
an unclenching of something.

When we touch down at home,
I notice the way my neighbours’ windows
throw gold into the dusk, hear someone laugh
further up the street. Her face changes.

Later that night I receive another letter
in that maddeningly rounded script.
I am apparently no longer her ideal client.
She suggests we go our separate ways.

The world opens up like a tulip.

Jen Feroze is a U.K. poet living by the sea. Her work has recently appeared in Stanchion, Stone Circle Review, OneArt, Magma, and Poetry Wales, among other publications. She was a winner of the 2022/2023 Magma Editors’ Prize and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming with Nine Pens Press.