Glen Armstrong

Glen Armstrong holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He edits a poetry journal called Cruel Garters and has two new chapbooks: Simpler Times and Staring Down Miracles. His work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Conduit, and Cream City Review.

 

Dandelion

Like anything else
that starts with a kiss
the wind, sometimes violent

sometimes barely there at all,
jiggles the weeds and willows.
Nothing scatters.

Like anything else
that refuses to scatter,
the dandelion is young

and hasn’t yet seen its own undoing
in the fractured husk of a seed.
It needs no mythology

to feel the sun
or brave the wind or live
as a citizen in a yellow metropolis.

The sun is now.

It sees, instead, immortality,
a mint-condition forever.
The dandelion knows nothing

ever failed to jump
fully grown and cricket-quick
from its own fragile skull.

© 2019 Glen Armstrong