ANNIKA NERF

I shouldn’t worry about the roses 

‘Knock-out roses’ the nursery called
this frenzy of pinks and corals;
I purchased two and gave them a home
in the cottage garden, amid
the fleabane and the goldenrod.
For six years they bloomed for me, May through
November, until the first frost nights
crystallize their final offerings. 

Today, here, the time has come
as I suppose I always knew it would  
and I am to leave this small world I tended 
with my excess love.  
I worry what will happen to  
the sparrows and the duckweed and the grubs, 
the heedlessly unloved, 
while the coral roses whisper not to worry about them,  
softly budding in the fresh April sun. 
But I can’t stop myself — 
I dig up the smaller one, 
unearthing the frozen root ball
while thorns rip a line in the back of my hand.
I cloak her in tea towels 
and parcel up this little life.

I deceive Osman at the post office,
for alive things mustn’t be shipped.
As if to punish the lie, the postage 
amounts to half a week’s wages plus tax.

I call my estranged mother,
in whose house across the Atlantic I will live, 
again,
and ask her to borrow a car and visit the garden center
and buy the biggest flowerpot,
and wait for the mail.

Annika Nerf is a fiction writer, and a pocket-sized poet. She has written a novel on transgenerational war trauma for her PhD from the State University of New York at Albany. Her work has been awarded an Honorable Mention for the Creative Writing Book Award by the Northeast Modern Languages Association, and she is the 2026 writer-in-residence for the Swiss Society for the European Convention on Human Rights.