Your Own Worst Consequence

A quarter-season, dandelion, buttercup,

ground ivy, proud and purple, dried

and on the wind before I got wise.

Chopped back into the grass,

now a fixture in the landscape.

Though I doubt another life

will bring a reckoning, what good

does it do to wish you

poor,

found out, abandoned

in this one.

A two-time National Poetry Series finalist and graduate of the Mills College MFA program, Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Entropy, Alternet, Columbia Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she now tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.