Kristin Lueke | one billion flowers | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Kristin Lueke is a Chicana poet and author of the chapbooks here i show you a human heart (2025) (in)different math (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). Her work appears in Sixth Finch, LETTERS, Wildness, HAD, Maudlin House, Frozen Sea, and elsewhere.

Kristin Lueke's Website

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Also by Kristin Lueke: here i show you a human heart my husband was an animal nobody knows what a horse looks like Five Poems

December 3, 2025

Kristin Lueke

one billion flowers

weeping and/or willing let the wound tell me how— let my legs keep going let closer let conflict take shelter here i reach you take a moment here i listen take sugar in your coffee some gods move with grace take comfort take longing let flowers

originally titled fuck a million let one billion flowers bloom, this poem lived with me since september 2023, when i saw on a walk through my friend's neighborhood in portland a possum decomposing on the sidewalk. a man and his grandson sat on their porch, watching me look closer from the other side of the street. the man called out to me "that's been there for a few months now, you mind if he comes looks at with you? it scared the jesus out of me when i first saw it." so there i was with a sweet, quiet child crouched low, looking at how life works, and i asked him if he knew what kind of flowers they were, growing through the cracks in the sidewalk and what was once a possum. i wrote two poems about those few minutes. this one is the second. i needed to live with it a while to figure it out, open up the space in it, let it soften into something more or less complete.