Oleander

Flickering by the milky crescent, the pink petals

Outside my black window.

I saw them in darkness. They used to be white and they

Swayed like flags

When the spiked leaves offered to rouge. Acknowledgment of

How rouge was love and how love was red. Bloody red.

Unbearable, leafy kisses, blind to their blades

Thrusted in the twiggy necks for

Vampiric licks to gallop in the velvety clefts.

A patch of beaten skin, the sin. The cobwebby folds

I could not flatten rose like a fumy flame,

The bridal gown obscured by the glint

Breeds a pair of grapnel eyes.

Weaponized. Five thin, poisonous barbs.

In the festooned temple, in the holy kowtow

Cross-cupped sap hooks the petiolar heart

To corrode. Enormous burnt-black holes, Teal veins stuck out in

An infestation of ochre polka dots.

And I’m the goddess you’re bound to invoke

With sacrifice

On the bed in the nuptial chamber covered by

Scoops of the arbitrary blackness.

The lack of antidote, the bloodless crime

Lurking and whispering

But incapable, in the incapable night.