Poppies
by Rachel Calnek-Sugin

Once upon a time I had an aunt who was a witch. She lived in a white wooden house with a rickety wicker porch surrounded by fields of poppies. There wasn’t a square foot of her three or four acres in rural Northern Louisiana that wasn’t bursting with them. From late March until early May, there must have been thousands of flowers that dotted the landscape like flecks of paint or dribbles of blood with petals that all seemed to unfurl on the same day in an astonishing explosion of red.