I had never seen one outside a cookie. When she handed it to me, brown and bulbous like an onion, I didn’t expect it to juice with perfume at first taste. A kiss from the pink mouth of a flower grown inward. If the crunch it made between my teeth was a wasp, I didn’t know. There were no wings or antennae I could see. Just seeds, velvet skin. A stem to throw away. 

Crystal Stone's poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Occulum, Anomaly, BONED, Eunoia Review, isacoustics, Tuck Magazine, Writers Resist, Drunk Monkeys, Coldnoon, Poets Reading the News, Jet Fuel Review, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, North Central Review, Badlands Review, Green Blotter, Southword Journal Online and Dylan Days. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Iowa State University, gave a TEDx talk on poetry the first week of April and her first collection of poetry, Knock-Off Monarch, is forthcoming from Dawn Valley Press this autumn. You can find her on Twitter @justlikeastone8 and on instagram @stone.flowering.