An Unnatural History of Tulips

By now the tulip’s parabolic curves are as deeply etched into consciousness as a Coke bottle’s; ... the tulip one meets in the world matches the tulips resident in one’s head.
—Michael Pollan

I. Tulipomania

The tulip begins in a theft.
Ends with a single doctor beating
blooms to death on the street
with his cane, typewriter teeth driving
home after sale slips’ worth
burned spring in Holland, 1635.

There’s a term for reversion, when
offsets show a throwback
past the parent plant.
You and I know the first tenet
of beauty under ultraviolets.

Our x-ray goggles on. Alchemist
kit gleams on the counter, we boil
and candy the bulb. Throw vinegar
in the frying pan, pray for some
need of hair roots known to split
rocks. Soil aerates with metal
whisks. Grafting. Signatures

inscribed promissory notes as dowry
all our cat-burglar tools pawned, acres
houses mortgaged for the dormant. Lines

drawn in a still hand. Spade blade-sides
pursed over the reproductive organs.
Peeled and chopped across the sidewalk
at the feet of an old man, a pile
of paper, inner-patterned tough tepals
pose for an anatomy lesson, the second tenet

II. The Break

trained into pointelle, crude
pigment banking. A carpet. Looms rigged
monochrome: the third. What draws us

covers stemworks, dirt, twinned leaves
unwinding—a ribbon drawn
from a lock. Breaks

a stroke, a brush bristle pinched
between two fingers stains
base to lip. Familiar pattern.
Rituals, of course, formed to conjure

occurred plants from the ground.
Dry pigments cover beds, waiting
the roots to suck up. Plaster dust of
old houses. Pigeon shit. Egg whites.
Candle wax. Your daughter’s hair filament
by filament watching the swell—

mouthings through glass. Lines outside
poetry drowsy in fleshy rocks.

Electron microscopes world-wide
were blamed for drawing it all
down to the cellular level. An aphid
mandible-heavy. Stripping

vein systems, like arms, hairs.
Eradication of the great break
flowers. Full of guts as they are

III. Absolute Black

anything can be projected
on pure blacks. Rocking
horses. The shoplifted
dress your sister
never lent. Slant-backed

kitchen chair where our shoe-patcher
sits, legends, on utilitarian table-top
he holds what we’ve all been
looking for. To multiply. Men

barter the absolute black
tulip in foreign currency, values
monstrous, untranslated. What moral

here on the sidewalk as men blur
bulb tissue and taunt the old
cobbler to death. Knowing he’d
killed unknowingly—
better to die before that story leaks.
Stains the sidewalk, streets, floods
run through the country-side
to a town—

Hand tools are drawn and
eye-pieces sit on our foreheads, in
imprints, symmetric to the horizon
another pair of eyes, outlines.




Maggie Queeney lives in Chicago, where she works and reads and plans to start an MFA program soon.



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