Pushed away: Gladiolas

It inflates with visible effort, reaching for the impressive version of every account of itself, and the strain shows, which is the particular difficulty here: the display is strenuous rather than smooth, and other people can see the work in it. Being largely overlooked by the mother in a household organised around the father's standing taught it that presence has to be manufactured, and manufacturing is laborious when there is no early experience of simply having been noticed. What it asks for is one hour of taking up an ordinary amount of room and finding out that nobody leaves.

I work extremely hard at seeming like someone who doesn't have to.

It echoes Trishanku, who insisted on ascending to heaven in his own body, was pushed back from the gate, and ended up suspended between the two skies in a heaven built specially to hold him, upside down. The form implies a task: to come down and stand on the ground with everyone else.