Flower tongue
Daffodils hate being shoved in corners. When forced they emit a peculiar scent, part butter, part ulcer. I wear yellow shoes because I don’t like corners either but I am frequently left in them, and so I exude a peculiar smell. You sense it even from outside and I feel you hesitate and turn away.
You come only when I’m helpless. Leave behind a single flower, fluffed red above a slender stalk, both arrow and wound. Efficient as always. Through sleeping pill half-death you hurl accusation; you don’t, you don’t you don’t you don’t. But what is it I don’t do? I hang waiting for the final word but after all this time, still nothing but your carnation bleeding on the low white table in a room scribbled with what comes to me in the thrall of sleep. Looping with a brittle elegance I don’t possess into the dip of your upper lip the exact imprint of my baby finger. As if I pressed you into being. And still there’s something I lack? What is it I don’t do?
And why a carnation? Carnations are strife and empire, a February siege. Carnations are hammered screams, the flicking of a naked switchblade, splintered walls. I scrabble through the shattering on knees and elbows and all before I open my eyes. Stuffed with the hot smell of a single warring flower.
And there it is, my line at last. Drawn from my chapped lips slender as a hair up the arc of your cheek to hook in your eye. My one red line and it’s too close for you to see.
Eirene Gentle is a writer of (mostly) little lit based in Toronto, Canada. Former news editor in chief, published in The Hooghly Review, Litro, JAKE, Anti-Heroin Chic, Maudlin House, Roi Faineant. Coming soon to Leon Literary, Bull, Ink in Thirds.