Rebecca Brown

my lover who doesn’t love,
doesn’t love her body

my lover who doesn’t love says,
this skin doesn’t fit

my lover who doesn’t love
wants to become a tree,

grow tall, learn to re-limb 

when she leaves,
she doesn’t leave anything behind

My favorite souvenir is a small glass jar with sequoia seeds in it, that my grandparents brought back from a trip to California when I was about nine. At the time I planned on keeping them until I had a place of my own to plant them. They've stayed with me through three apartments, two states and over a thousand miles. I don't know if they would even be able to grow into a tree, but I'm going to keep them just in case.

Rebecca Brown is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama, who spends a lot of time writing love poems to cornfields. Their work is recently published or forthcoming from Alien Mouth, the Pittsburgh Poetry Review and Potluck Mag. They can usually be found on twitter, @notalake, or on tumblr, notamountain.tumblr.com.