Monica Fields
Blue Camellias
First Runner-up for the 2025 American Literary Review Award in Poetry, Judged by Carolina Ebeid
How often I think of this photo of my mother—Her pale legs folded casually on the plastic lawn chair,
Her thin cigarettes and flat-ironed hair, the image a dim
And blemished Polaroid, hazy cucumbers sliced and salted
On the frail saucer beside her, and the blue camellias:
Their petals scalloped arches of cathedral windows,
Their fine-toothed leaves glossy in the sunlit grove.
Evening comes and ice skirts up the windows lacily.
Tired evening branches engrave hieroglyphs
Into the frosted panes. It’s evening, and I cannot read them,
Their lines are liminal and fading. Evening and the
Thick black birds that carried all my words to Edens
Better than this yard where the bare rose bushes
Hum, tell me I am a simple girl who harvests corn
And heavy camellia blooms.
I return to the smoke-stained trailer’s living room,
Press for her in blue arrangements. She never comes.
Because there are no blue camellias—
Blush varieties, cream and scarlet, but not blue.
And the thin lakes did not ice over beneath the bare February trees,
The stiff grass the only sound that mourns
When instead of the mother I imagine, I find her
Shucking corn on the thin porch where the black birds gathered.
These evenings fragments of my script to translate come,
But like an amnesiac whose name emerges heavily from
A small box sprung, when I recall the words, I don’t believe
They’re mine. I turn the edges of the puzzle box again
To find my mother in the lawn chair, the girl in the blue
Camellia grove, and the birds carrying away their silken
Ciphers, to bury them in blooms.