You sprung
among thirty beakers by the window of a high school classroom,
water in glass, blanketed by oil,
anchoring leaves of a plant
misidentified as mallow.
Sturdy and green, with eight radial veins like the fingers of a supplicant hand,
you led us to pluck you from the parking lot’s edge,
where the flowers blared like trumpets,
in petals of five,
in hues of scarlet and butter gold.

I unearthed your ribcage
upon a beaten lab bench, in an owl pellet’s fur,
and tried to pin you
down in the posture of a formaldehyde frog.
Green and florid,
photosynthesizing with the secrets of life,
you abandoned yourself to mildew by that window for months—
and then,
before my still-inquisitive eyes,
you cleaned yourself away
like candy wrappers and eraser crumbs from your own classroom floor.
Why did you leave use? How can I ever see your face again?
Questions you trained us to ask;
answers you will never give, that can never be mine to know.

You bloom now
by memory’s unexpected edge:
five years, two hundred miles removed,
out of sidewalk cracks and squirrel-tilled dirt,
as stamens, metastases, and mitochondria projected on a screen inside a lecture hall.
Resilient and indelible, miracle of life,
your scarlet petals as ever flare
with discovery.
Nasturtium, I know now, was your true name.

Jenny is a UC Berkeley student pursuing her B.A. in molecular cell biology and comparative literature.