by Elinor Ann Walker
after the photograph by Sally Mann (American, 1988)
In the photograph, a child
in Virginia wears a desert cactus
draped around her clavicles like a scarf,
a necklace, a mother’s eye, or
innocence arrested, one moment
collared. White is the color
of most night-bloomers, their
velvet centers seductive
to pollinators—hawkmoth
& sphinx, dark-winged & whirring.
The child is stayed in stillness,
her sweetness, whatever is fierce
in her jaw’s line, while the cereus
glows fleetingly, blooms for one
night only in June or July. Fragrance
must waft to her lips, her half-
framed face, as breezes blow,
or if a mosquito whirs too closely,
each moment thick with humid
air, embrace on her bare skin
where wilted petals rest. The clavicle
is the most commonly fractured bone.
Her mother must have draped
the fragile stems so carefully,
knowing a daughter’s delicate way
of going, how absence tendrils the throat
& fronds the neck, as if she went
out into one midsummer’s night
& never came back in.
Elinor Ann Walker (she/her) holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, lives near the mountains, and prefers to write outside. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Nimrod, The Penn Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Plume, Poet Lore, The Shore, The Southern Review, Terrain.org, The Vassar Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has recently completed a full-length manuscript of poetry and two chapbooks. Find her online at elinorannwalker.com.