Becca Rose Hall

Flowers but not only flowers, dusk but not only dusk

I used to be a rosebud on tea party china but now I’m a fuchsia
splurge of rhododendron and a red one and I don’t care who sees.

I used to think gray rain fell freely, but how much it asks, the earth
losing all moderation. And I thought once I was born

of a simple family, weaned, raised, sent out, but now I know
I arrived on a high tide wearing the colors dusk gives the sea.

Tossed in the wash and hush,
I was damp as a milk-sweet mouth and mad as salt.

So I want you to know you have not made me lonely,
only shown me the loneliness already mine.

See, I am the shade of a child’s singing
in the upstairs of an empty house.

I am the smell of lilacs spilling down all the long avenues of evening.
I am the moment they are no longer enough.

Becca Rose Hall’s work has appeared recently in Orion Magazine, sPARKLE and bLINK, Orion Online, Mutha Magazine, About Place, The Dark Mountain Project, SoFloPoJo, Pacifica Literary Review, and is forthcoming from Third Coast and Drunk Monkeys. Her work has been supported by Community of Writers, Writers Lighthouse, Arts Omi and Zvona i Nari, and she has been a contributor at Bread Loaf and Sewanee. She studied writing at Stanford and the University of Montana. She writes the Substack newsletter, A Few Crooked Words about helping kids love writing. She lives in Seattle with her daughter.