Tonight We Will Bloom for One Night Only by Alexis Rhone Fancher

Tonight We Will Bloom for One Night Only

Tonight you must plow me a respite between the moonflowers,
mock orange, night phlox, and Epiphyllum Oxypetalum.
You must open me to the summer night like cereus.

You must pick my perversions like petals, allow them for one night
to bloom, frangipani wafting, a concupiscent wind humming at my door.

I’ve surrendered to your heady sweat of primrose, plumeria,
addicted to your outstretched arms of night-blooming jasmine,
my heliotrope buds hard and wanting, reeking of Madagascar vanilla with its
accompanying moral ambiguity.

I am more than a day lily.

We are each bodies, hard-wired for pleasure, destined for momentary blooming,
then extinction.

When the bats swarm and the moths sidle up to this one night of fevered
pollination, let’s be ready.

Let’s face them, our appetency the headlights they slam into again and again.

We will make our escape at first light. Singing.

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

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Editor’s Note: Flowers as metaphor for pleasure… yes. And it is the single line in the middle of the poem where meaning pivots and gives the words energy. That line is why I kept reading —because that is where the meaning broke free of the image and became personal.