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Michigan Bouquet
Craig Cotter

Sweat pea, goldenrod, trillium, hepatica—

mayapple, cow vetch, black-eyed Susan.

*

Did you have to wash the bugs off?

*

A small glass vase

on the marble window sill

above the kitchen sink.

*

Walking by genetically-engineered plants
in Los Angeles today—

I need a Michigan swamp.

—for Phyllis Cotter

—
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. HIs poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Great Lakes Review, Hawai’i Review, and Tampa Review. His fourth book of poems is After Lunch with Frank O’Hara.

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Have you read these poems:
Where Is the Saint If Not in the Slightest of Things? by Paulann Petersen
Climbing Trees by Peter R. Selover

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