Reunion by Steve Deutsch

Mom and Dad
loved lupine,
but couldn’t control it.

Year after year, they’d plant
the finest seeds
in the finest soil

but it bloomed where it would.
My brother left
home the day

after his sixteenth birthday.
I hear from him now
and again—chicken scratch

on the back of a postcard
or a long-distance call
from some place

in the California desert
where lupines are native.
Perhaps he is harvesting

some to bring home—
a handsome gift
for a nurturing couple.

The lupines come up
whenever they will
wherever they will

and my brother
just called
from someplace new.

In a better world the lupine
Would grow where they plant it
and my brother would walk in the door.



Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. He has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. Steve's chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full-length books, Persistence of Memory and Going, Going, Gone, were also published by Kelsay Press. Another collection, Slipping Away, was published this past spring and his latest, Brooklyn, was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and has just been published.