What are fake flowers for?

To list on winter balconies, whitely rendered carpels run-up with frost. To boast of an immediate lapse into a false humus, lying anthers beaded with green plastic.

The luminescence. The discount aisles lined with stiff stamen, a whiff of cross-polliation from the bath and body shelves: lavender, peony, ripe oranges in January.

That’s all, I guess: a heliotropic whisper, some pink-purple flight from transience, a way that we have found to make things last that should not last:

stigmas, styles, sepals.

What we find, blossomed into our freezing breaths as we stand outside of shop windows, looking into at the seedless symbol, is that we want it. We do.

We want what fake flowers are for.