The Buffalo Botanical Conservatory Kindly Asks That Visitors Do Not Feed the Fish
The koi are to remain morally pure
Do not feed them your Cheetos, cracker crumbs, Starlight mint out of its wrapper.
That shit will kill them.
A fish is not a person.
So what if it spends its life with only pellets and algae in the gullet?
But their mouths project like parachutes out of the water’s surface,
swimming over each others’ bodies, fins lashing, water flicked onto my shoes.
They sense I will slip them this loose granola and a crushed Dum-Dum.
Desperate creatures, worst impulses, wild carelessness. What kind of ethics can you
have in a man-made pond? What illusion do they think they are preserving?
No Really! You’re a Goddess!
People say they love vulnerability, but not every raw thing is beautiful.
You can learn this lesson in a middle school cafeteria or
after junior year of college when she says we can still be friends.
You can learn it later in a community center flower arranging class, sharing
fun facts around the circle when you say
I actually don’t know why I’m here, flowers make me sad.
Writers are supposed to be tender.
You cannot treat your work, your most desperate love
Like wire wolf with no guts.
So you keep going, you make phone-call confessions,
That’s what you wanted to talk about?
not about dead dove, or dead dog, or dead child,
but daydreams about what if you could live a second life alongside this one.
You brush your finger along the spines of books like you are touching a lover
and other library patrons side-eye your misplaced sensuality.
Your humiliation, you thought, was part of a barter system for authenticity.
Not this artless thing,
Not this drooped bundle, smelling of the edge
Of rot, bacterial growth in the stem.
You grab the blooms in your fist, mash the petals into pulp,
Draw your palms down your cheeks, leaving
Streaks, a dare, while you angle cut more stems
on flowers that will die,
are already dead but
look how pretty.
S.A.M. Hutner (she/her) writes fiction and poetry from her home in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing appears in the Northeast Ohio Sewer District’s Ode to Infrastructure, Blink-Ink, and on the RadioFreeWrite podcast. In 2024 and 2025, she was a Literary Arts Resident at Craigardan. She can be found at @s.a.m.hutner on Instagram.