I sent you tulips, with all the obligations plucked away. Just the pretty stuff, I said– the bright petals and the inky insides, a leaf or two maybe for balance. If a poem were a flower, this would be it. You don’t need to water or press them, or trap their likeness in your camera.

I did not send you an obligation, I sent you a poem, a moment, a flower named after a wrap that stays put.

Stay put. Heal up. Don’t worry about the buds.

When I was very small, I thought faeries lived inside the orange tulips outside my bedroom window. That the sepals were so inky because they were made of everything the small creatures needed to say. On the last leg of their journey, I would press the stain into tree stumps and grown-up palms and read as much as I could of the stories they could only tell to the page.

This is how some creatures are best understood.

Some of us speak with mind, and write with heart.

I used to think of tulips as a sort of poem craft, heart vessel– a train in motion. When the faeries departed from them, they left a soft dust. It settled on the orange. It floated in the air. I thought it was healing earth, healing us.

Heal up.

I sent you tulips, with all the obligations plucked away, and all the faeries resting until they can reach you and wrap you in stay.

Stay.

Don’t worry about the buds. They are on their way to another station and do not need care. They only stopped by to bring you a little healing, a little color, and a soft magical dust.