The Corpse Flower

the horizon’s just a straight razor laid across the throat of the world, no curve, no mercy, just that thin bleeding line where sky fucks earth and nothing else moves. out there in the big empty, the desert, heat shimmers like cheap gin, and everything looks like it’s melting into a lie.

the desert.

her laboratory, her goddamn petals, her microscope slides turning yellow with sweat and fever.

she’s bouncing now between burning sand and some frozen courtyard back in Paris, that little stone box she calls a cottage. coldest winter they ever wrote down, they say. a single rose in a vase turned to ice, some fool’s valentine gift, while the malaria chews her bones like a slow drunk gnawing a bar rag. hallucinations thicker than the piss in her mattress. she sees the naked willow out there in the courtyard, those stringy whore arms hanging down, touching dirt like they’re begging for it, gravity yanking them the way men used to yank her.

then snap, back to the desert sky, pure and heartless, her bed soaked through, springs rusted with somebody else’s piss and her new blood. mosquito did its business, little vampire prick, and left the bill.

fifth time this year the fever’s come calling, like a pimp who knows she’s good for it. some tainted needle in a Sumatra ward, shaking so hard the gurney rattles like a cheap motel bed. all because she had to see that stinking corpse flower, biggest goddamn bloom in the jungle, had to get her pictures, her notes, her little slice of immortality while the parasites threw a party in her veins.

no time for anything else.
no time for living.
just the line, the fever, the flower that smells like death, and her doing the same.