"A corpse flower"

"The addition of not"

Jessie Jones

Jessie Jones grew up in the prairies, spent a decade on Vancouver Island and now resides in Montreal. Her writing has been featured in CV2, filling Station, Lemon Hound, Minola Review, PRISM, The Puritan, Arc, B O D Y, and Poetry London (UK). She has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award, Editor’s Choice in Arc’s Poem of the Year prize, and first-runner up PRISM’s Poetry Award. Nix, her first chapbook, was published by Desert Pets Press in 2017. She is the founder of Literistic, and her first poetry collection will be available in fall of 2020.

“‘A corpse flower’ is based on several time-lapse videos on YouTube of corpse flowers blooming in the summer of 2016. Previous to that summer, only 50 blooms had been recorded in the history of cultivation—but suddenly, dozens bloomed within weeks of each other.”

“The addition of not’ takes its title from the artist’s statement accompanying Sarah Meyohas’s video art piece Cloud of Petals, which digitized 10,000 individual rose petals.”

A corpse flower

is blooming
in the Bronx.

The smell makes men weep
for their stupid, loose skin.

Carrion
on the seasonal balm
like a body on a wave

while bodies
in the waves
at the city beach
peek over pavlova suds
with daffy little

sucks of breath. The sun bleaches
and makes radiant
the ribcage.

Such effort
to surface
and resurface
our gamy frames,

near ridiculous.

In bloom all
over North America,
a nightmare
at the heart
of botanical gardens.

The skirt lifts
for the pinball eyes
of tourists, spadix
stately as a centurion.

A rouged broom.
A near-perfect specimen
of death,

which is to say:
continual and colourful.

No one way.

The large all small
and cognizant
when we are one.

If two, the bridge comes down.

Zero loves me not
and the dog park howls.

The sky fills
with a whipped
white wind.

In binary,
we are off, two
life preservers bumping
bellies in a viscous bath.

Insert minus
and it empties.
The drain gargles jelly.

To be more, I dig
with only my signature
until I locate
the root of one.

A beam of light
like paradise.

To be counted
is the love of me
entirely.

The cross-eyed prize
of two.

From a head of zeroes
I select a petal
for its perfect shape
and colour and texture.

A sequin without reflection,
a face flashes in me now.