LAUREN SAMBLANET

from: be still, behold, beholden to woodland blossoms

for months, when i masturbate, i see white lilies, 
the lilies are in a field, each time my body lights up in
pleasure. later, in research, i learn that lilies most often 
grow in woodland habitats – not the open expanse of 
fields, but the shroud of pine trees, the ache of enclosure.
eventually, in my self-pleasure, the lilies fade and i find 
my way back to desire for bodies, not desire to be amidst, 
legs tickled by their stems, looking out at what seems endless,
the overwhelming floral scent & six white tepals.

when the lilies return, i am no less confused when
i cum & no less confused in love, but exceedingly
deeper in a pit of depression. it’s true, though,
that lilies can occur in fields – i search the internet
and learn, again, that i can’t trust everything written,
though my allegiance to language goes deep. the lilies
return as an accident, in a depressive state, my body in
the grocery store leads to me the flowers. they are on 
sale, $1.99 for beautiful bouquets. my hands clasp them –
christmas-themed, with pines and christmas-tree cellophane,
and there among the other flowers & pine,                      madonna 
lilies,        star-gazer lilies,                   fragrant and white.

in depression, my body kicks into survival mode despite 
the recurring suicidal thoughts. my body does yoga, 
my body eats huge bowls of greens and brown rice, 
my body reads poems & types poems & enters the bath. 
and in all of these activities – mind tugging along behind 
the body as if on a leash – the lilies come along. vases on 
the kitchen table, vases on my desk, vases on the coffee table, 
and vases on the toilet seat during the baths. and in each of these 
settings, these sometimes precarious placements, up from the 
six white tepals, green style & dark purple stigma surrounded 
by the burnt orange stamen, fuzzy with pollen – an emblem 
of my desire, stiff & poking up from what seems
soft – surrounded by all genders – multiple, pollenous residue.

the lily, it seems, particularly the white lily,
the madonna, calls to mind for many – virginity,
purity. antithesis of how my body feels when seeing
or imaging the white lily. wikipedia tells me that
the flowers are pure white and tinted yellow in their
throats & i see this yellow tint as the scream held
in a woman’s throat when she is asked to abstain from
sex to remain in good favor with god and men. not a
tint but a stain of patriarchy. at times, i am concerned
that my erotic desire holds within it the image
& scent of white lilies, but maybe masturbating to the
tepal,                     style,      stigma, stamen,                      filament,
maybe, then, i am helping ghosts rinse the yellow stain out.

the first time i hear the fourth movement of julia wolfe’s
anthracite fields, it is out of context of the rest of the movements –
and i think this is one of the most beautiful choral movements
i’ve heard & later when i listen to all five movements, on 
a drive to work in colorado winter, i am disturbed by
how naïve my first take of the movement could have been.
flowers steeped in labor, flowers steeped in coal, flowers steeped
in suffocation, in death that occurs in dark & claustrophobic 
pockets of earth, flowers steeped in the violent history of capitalism,
in the violent history of human destruction of the earth. 
we all had flowers. we all had gardens.                          roses
and lilies and violets and asters                         can a lily grow
out of a death? can a lily save someone from a kind of death?

i don’t know. i don’t know. i say it in therapy mid attempt to suss 
things out, i say it to my friends mid attempt to suss things out, i say
it to my cat, in the shower, to my partner. i don’t know. i am 
beholden to my own process of processing. i am beholden to my 
confusion in the moment. i begin to doubt that i will ever make
a clear decision again. the madonna lily’s light yellow stigma 
poking out, surrounded by dark purple stamen. a desire so 
multiple                                                   it tints my throat yellow.

did she love                       or was it an escape                       a bell tinkling with vigor                       orange pollen

                 tracing her nose      body of a love, never lover             desire, that dark fuel         puffing air with vigor

on netflix, i watch a show called dark before i’ve fallen
into the dark myself. in one episode, dead birds fall
en masse from the sky & the soundtrack to this bird-death
is the fourth movement from anthracite fields: flowers.
flow-flow-flowers-flow-flow-flow-flow-flowers.
for many episodes, i continue watching the show though
i don’t know if i like it or not. by the end, the promise
of dark has grown dark & not even time travel is enthralling
enough to stall the – i don’t know – longer. at some point,
i don’t know flows into knowing, at least for experiences
outside myself – the visual, the cinematic, a field of
white lilies erupting                             from pines.

in confusion, i launch into the sensory. lily’s tepals 
are thicker than they appear to the eyes. thick and slick
and ever so soft. the same softness i imagine when i think of
how a crush’s breasts might feel if touched lightly, the way
one touches a flower petal – fingertips tingly with curiosity,
but timid in the face of something beautiful. amidst my
yellow tinted throat, yellow with ghosts &
guilt, i stall in fantasy.                  i confuse 
moving my limbs with curling in the fetal position.

while curled in the fetal position, i notice my fingertips
are stained yellow. so, too, then my stomach, my bladder.
i drink turmeric in milk or sometimes in hot water
with a splash of apple cider vinegar. refusing to believe
that my depression is long-lasting enough for medication,
despite its frequent returns since youth, i drink turmeric as 
a natural remedy & tell my therapist – each time i’m depressed 
again, it feels like some kind of betrayal, like i was supposed
to have beaten it – the last time, finally. like amidst the lilies,
always the sharp                                   needle of the pine.

were it not for my body’s wisdom, i might be
dead. i touch the lily tepals. i inhale – a scent
that a loved one hates and how she hated my queerness, 
how she denied it and prayed it back into the closet. the stigma,
the stamen. i love who i love, i love how i love,
multiple, intense, splitting me open, i love
in motion & can’t sit still, i love him, her, them,
i love                                                                                       flowers.

from puffed air                     a hand crunching & a crumpling                      of form                   a rising of strings

                an intensity of scale             body of a love in dream or dreaming              orange pollen in bloodstream

on facebook, someone in philadelphia comments,
on a picture of peonies, that flowers seem like a part
of my identity. first it was roses, tattooed on my arm.
then sunflowers for malia who died of overdose. in
philadelphia, flowers abundant, it was a new crush
each week – magnolia, dahlias, daffodils, hyacinth,
tulips and on. then the peonies took me. having always
loved the scent of lilies, i should have known but,
swept away by them, i am taken aback by my desire.

lauren samblanet is a poet and hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making & other makers of forms. she is a graduate of temple university's mfa program & she currently lives in colorado. some of her poems have been published in a shadow map: an anthology by survivors of sexual assault, bedfellows, the tiny, crab fat magazine, aglimpseof, and queen mob's teahouse.