Abby Murray is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2025 Poetry Contest

Of All the Qualities She Could Have Inherited

She carries my penchant for flowers
she hasn’t learned to identify as weeds.

she brings me dandelions, red clover,
morning glories, buttercups, even

scotch broom, and I prop them up
in a vodka bottle on the windowsill

because she can’t believe her luck, how
nobody fought to collect these beauties

before she did, how she found them
heaped on yard waste piles or reaching

up from the cement or clay beneath
utility poles and fenceposts. She thinks

this world must have lost its mind
and she isn’t wrong: purple fleabane

has more to teach us about how to love
than a mowed lawn. And isn’t love what

we’re all dying to understand in our own
industrious, misguided ways? My husband

still cracks jokes, says shit like wonder
doesn’t pay the bills. He isn’t wrong either

but is less right than our daughter,
who sprints up the sidewalk, her fist full

of pink evening primroses—creepers
the internet decries as pretty but monstrous

waving them in the air like gemstones
from a dragon’s lair, proof she existed

in an unforgiving place and brought back
that which doesn’t need forgiveness.

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. As a nonbinary pacifist married to a cis-gender active duty army officer, they’ve spent their adult life writing and researching the struggle for voice and listening between communities. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Prize from Ex Ophidia Press and has been nominated for the National Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Wash., and currently teaches writing to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.