Caitlin Scarano

Mud Season with Her Glass Flowers

tulips and hellebores, stems under
-appreciated. My organizing principle keeps slipping
off in the night, a fox silently piercing a series
of fencelines. Darkness blooms in wingtip
& branch bud. I realized today I am in love
with transitions more than the men
who make them possible. Antiques my mother
kept. May in the mountains of the Blue Ridge.
I’ve been trying my whole life to tell someone
about the damn farmhouses.

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Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize, won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award and was a finalist for the WA State Book Award. She is a 2024-2025 Watershed Fellow with the Public Humanities Collaboratory in Oregon. She was selected as the winner of CutBank’s 2024 Genre Contest in Poetry and won LitMag’s 2024 Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction. Find her at caitlinscarano.com.