“Blossoming” by Michelle Masood
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Blossoming” by Michelle Masood, third place winner of the 2025 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth, senior category.
Blossoming
By Michelle Masood
It’s spring & my hair has grown out again. Like history, everything moves
in cycles of growth then unexpansion. The street where all my deepest
recollections backflow & rush to the front. The magnolias that yawn over
onto the sidewalk past the fence. Those small piles of litter recessed into my memory.
Aprils obscure themselves like layers of cellophane
blurring into a dizzy flushed mess. I’m pink too, with envy.
Once a better poet than I made eye contact with me for at least three minutes
& I hid, blushing, for the rest of the day. People kept passing my hot face
mistaking me for a new cheap replacement for spring foliage.
It was winter & I was unconcerned with the future or appearances.
Now just one tree is full of flowers unfolding like birds.
How am I supposed to compete with that?
In a floral skirt on the path to enlightenment I gave up
on love finding me & nothing changed. I guess a butterfly mid-heatstroke
took some shaded refuge on the red & white polyester
but I didn’t take it as a sign of anything. After three summers
falsely declared to be the summer of love only for them to turn out
summers of unbearable sadness, whole jars of olives, mandarin pop,
I saved all my suffering for spring, where I at least could be miserable
surrounded by chic pinks. That strip of sidewalk where we didn’t kiss
is wearing half-dead petals like a perfumed rug. My nails
are painted with ugly purple fashionings of plant life.
After some liberated months I finally spent an hour re-shaving my legs,
spraying perfume that smells like jam, plucking flowers so they wilt in my hair.
I am trying very hard to be beautiful.
Copyright © Michelle Masood
Third place winner of the 2025 Jessamy Stursberg Poetry Prize for Canadian Youth, senior category.
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