Amy Laessle-Morgan

Tuberose

I’ll admit it now
I’ve had Citizen Kane all wrong.
I thought “Rosebud”
was the thing
you lost.

It’s 2 p.m. on a mundane Monday
and I find myself small again
wedged behind the spare room door
where the adults threw their winter coats across the bed.
Damp wool, salt-stained leather, Marlboro Reds—
desperate for the soft ivory one that meant my aunt arrived.
No snow globe revelations
just 5 seconds of a satin-coat-lining Tuberose embrace.

Her perfume found my face in the dark
slid its heavy palms over my eyelids
and held me close before it vanished downstairs
just like the adults.

Years later I learned tuberose isn’t even a rose

Tube-rose.
To-be-rose.
Rose-but-not.
Little fraud-flower.
Little almost.
Little buried mouth—feeding on the dirt.

We all know Rosebud burns in the end
with no one there to recognize it.
I used to think that was the saddest thing in the world—
to reach back through eighty years
and die asking
for the first thing that made you innocently happy.

Now at forty-seven, in a drafty bathroom
I dab the liar-flower on my throat
behind the ears
across the thin blue veins of my wrists.

A grown woman suffocating herself in expensive oil
trying to become the air
that saved
then left her.