Heartpen: Poems of a Cardiac Quill

Olivia Greene

Aiden loved Olivia Greene,

but she didn't love him back.

Every day he waited for her

by the shiny steel slide that your clothes stuck to

when you tried to go down,

and every day he asked her to marry him,

but as many times as he asked,

the answer was always the same.

Daffodils were everywhere that spring.

They made the forest yellow,

their dew-kissed petals splayed

like folding fans

of grace.

And the lake was full of

water lilies with pink blossoms and white blossoms,

sometimes both

pink and white.

Suburbia was all daffodils and water lilies.

There was such a surplus of daffodils in fact

that little Aiden

never had to go far to pick one.

His school bus rolled to a stop,

and he trotted out with his green hat and camouflage backpack

and set off down the gray sidewalk

until he found a bush teeming with the yellow flowers.

He picked a daffodil and held it to his nose.

The corolla smelled like

perfume, bubblegum, hard candies.

Recess came, the school bell shrieked,

and he went to wait by the slide.

Boys and girls of his second-grade class

chased each other

and threw things

and called each other names

and rolled in mud—

and Aiden

waited.

Mrs. Lincoln's students

burst through the rusty doors

of the schoolhouse

like a tiny stampede.

The freckly girl with the large brown eyes

and the pudgy pink face

stopped and looked at the green-hatted boy

with the daffodil behind his back.

She swayed as Aiden held out

his soggy flower

and proposed.

She shook her head and skipped away.

Aiden hated Olivia Greene.