First Thought, Best Thought

I’m three or four,
hidden in the branches

of the cherry tree.
I don’t ask: how

did I get here?
I don’t fear falling.

The job of the blossom
is to bloom, to be

beautifully unschooled in ruin.

Andrea Cohen is the author of the poetry collections Everything (Four Way Books, 2021), Nightshade (Four Way Books, 2019), Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Threepenny Review, Poetry magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere.

She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts.