The flower opens
without violence.
This is what I learned in elementary,
how resistance lives in softness.
I stand in the kitchen, watching
petals drift into my teacup,
thinking of my mother’s hands
folding white sheets,
how they will yellow with time.
Everything pale
becomes something else.
In dreams, I am not
this daughter who changes
without permission.
I am the space between
what she saved
and what she lost.
She told me once:
to preserve a flower,
you must kill it carefully.
Press yourself between two worlds
until you become
something else entirely.
But morning traces each inherited gesture,
light enters the body
and makes it transparent,
some things they could not take away.
I have studied the process of transformation:
cell
membrane
chlorophyll
decay.
These are not separate things.
When the flower falls,
it becomes earth again.
When we change,
we are most ourselves—
a theory of perpetual becoming.
This morning, I found
white petals in my hair,
not knowing how they got there.
Perhaps I too am blooming
into something
I never meant to be.
This is not violence.
This is not preservation.
This is the body
remembering its first truth:
change.
-Stafford Challenge 2025
