Good Housekeeping calls them “sturdy beauties,”
and you want to buy them all, test an improved
version of yourself: someone capable
of keeping plants alive. Like a prior self 
who bought five skirts because she got the idea 
she was the kind of person who enjoyed wearing skirts.
But you didn’t know how to arrange your legs
and thought only of your lover reaching beneath with both hands,
fabric running through his fingers like water. But see?
Foliage can’t survive on metaphor or hope,
both feathery substitutions for staying.
You can’t do the same thing over and over 
and expect a different winnowing, can’t keep listening to
the consumer heart in you to know when you should be happy
and how you can stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Still, you buy the promise this purchase sells—twin ideas
that you are worth saving, that you’re the one
who can do the saving.