I Only Wanted to Be Your Flower

I Only Wanted to Be Your Flower is a collection of poems and prose about what happens when desire becomes attachment, attachment becomes identity, and love leaves behind something that cannot simply be forgotten. Moving through four sections—Hunger, Devotion, Rupture, and Becoming—Natalie Merrit writes from inside the contradictions of intimacy: tenderness and violence, longing and self-preservation, sexuality and grief, the desire to belong to another person and the need to remain oneself. Her language is intimate, sensual, and often unsparing. Flowers, mouths, bones, blood, ink, scars, and water recur across the collection, changing meaning as love is imagined, inhabited, lost, and carried forward. The body becomes both refuge and record—a place where pleasure, memory, damage, and desire remain long after circumstances have changed. But this is not simply a collection about heartbreak, nor does it promise the easy resolution of recovery. Merrit is interested in the more difficult territory that follows: how people continue to love what they have lost, how understanding can arrive before acceptance, and how a self is reconstructed from the things it has survived. I Only Wanted to Be Your Flower is ultimately a book about attachment, loss, and becoming—and the complicated work of discovering what remains when being loved by someone else can no longer answer the question of who we are.