'Flowers for Your Hair' in Northeast Review

'Flowers for Your Hair' was published,as I wrote earlier, in Northeast Review last month. The link is here. I am also putting the poem here below.

Flowers for Your Hair

These starry violets
with their thin green stems
and their aster-y white brethren
How would they look amassed
in the jungle of your long black hair
green stems tendrils intertwining
and stars shining? Or should I give you
a bunch of those gorgeous butterfly-
flowers- deep orange, red and yellow?
They would stand brilliantly
against the dense blackness of your hair.
There are some fake light orange ones
they look like plastic when the sun
shines through them, no, I’d rather
not give you those. There are some
fallen flowers. Would you rather
have those, or freshly plucked ones?
What would you say to a bunch
of snowdrops, with that stray curl
you tuck behind your ear?
There’s a wealth of azure blue-purple-
-pink tufts in the far corner
I could give you those, a bit
of the sky. I could make a chain
of these white daisies with
blue-purple centres and tints of orange
and garland you with it. They bloom
with the sun and close at sunset.
There are some blue exotica
with rings of orange. I don’t know
if you’d fancy ‘em. There are the
laughing orange and yellow nasturtiums
they droop. A bit flimsy for your hair,
I think, they might not stay put.
I wonder if you’d care for marigolds
in a bright and cheerful mood, on
a sunny day, there are pale yellow ones,
and orange ones ,I call them liquid gold.
There are way too many flowers here, I am
surrounded by them, scraggly pea-pods,
tall hollyhocks, foxgloves and what not
some mild, some tempting, some guarding
But if you’d wind that black mass
and tie it in a bun, I’d give you
just one single poppy, wicked-
crimson, intense-passion, its
pods bursting with black seeds
pregnant with opiate desire.