Iris

by Jane McKie

When I get to the hot country I fling my sunhat down,
letting my forehead bake to the gold of gooseberry piecrust.
My arms will soon burn, soaking up the pain of stoves,
because heat, here, is a bubbling, easeful substance.
I won’t have children. I’ll tell my husband to call me
by a new name. We’ll build on lava plains, eating creatures
that scurry past our front door. Relatives back home
will know the most minimal of postcard–musings,
less legible each year, or — even better — just that name,
which is, sentimentally, the name of a flower I can never grow.