CAPITAL FLOWER

We owe energy. We owe

the whole landscape. We

owe record breaking heat.

We owe rent. We owe tongue.

We owe sweat seeping a

leaky pipe without patch

from our glands. We owe

hazy metaphors of wind.

We owe faded flannels

and jeans. We owe inscape.

We owe women. We owe

butter statues built into

cows. We owe sonnets with

eroticism. We owe fragments

to collect them. We owe

fugue. We owe missing

persons. We owe it. We owe

illness. We owe one room

apartments. We owe rodent

infestation. We owe gravity.

We owe language. We owe

carbon dioxide with a side

of sulphuric breeze. We owe

forty hours a week. We owe

billionaires. We owe incubation.

We owe the church. We owe

uneven pavement and cobble.

We owe a fee. We do. We owe

the fuzz on our legs. We owe

laughing. We owe skeleton

trees. We owe the cenacle. We

owe owing. We owe a war.

We owe day in and day out.

There are over four million

species of flowers in the world.

We owe every last petal. We

are owed life. We owe death.

Julianne Neely received her MFA degree from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where she received the Truman Capote Fellowship, the 2017 John Logan Poetry Prize, and a Schupes Fellowship for Poetry. She is currently a Poetics PhD candidate and an English Department Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, VIDA, The Poetry Project, The Rumpus, The Iowa Review and more. Her chapbook The Body Beside Herself is available from Slope Editions and the chapbook affect theory is available from Garden-Door Press.