:: untitled sunshine jenkins

In botany they say quinoa, the mystical wonder-grain of the Incas, grows here along our sidewalks as weeds. No one sees it gripping the salty dirt next to telephone poles, as they walk to the food co-op to buy it, imported from distant lands for $7 a pound. Or even worse, they don’t believe it exists. It takes a different kind of looking to find it, unpresumptuous and fallible, growing through the cracks in our own familiar streets. In botany they tell us what looks like a flower is really hundreds of tiny flowers huddled together, sticking out their styles like tongues. I have a tongue, and sex parts, but they are not as simple and sleekly tubular, they are not as brilliant. My sex is muffled by sleep and streetlights blurring the darkeness of my room. There is an allure to dark pockets though, there is a tingle to furtiveness, even if its color is suppressed. What I mean is, she comes into my room when I am sleeping, and wakes me with the warmth of her mouth on my skin, quietly, so that she does not wake my roomate sleeping above us. Sometimes I only rise to a lighter layer of sleep, hallucinating that she is a mollusk gliding across my ear, or a sea slug slipping on my coral fingers; nocturnal rustlings in my garden of slumber. Sometimes she wakes me completely and I find myself blinking, focusing on the grey lit angles of her face, the shadows of her eye sockets, wondering how I ever thought I could know her; she is so distinctly other. They tell us the tricks: flowers that smell like rotting meat and lure flies into their tubes of hairs, dousing them in pollen before they escape. How did I get here, anyway? The magnetism of her stare? In the darkness she is blank. I can’t remember anything. Like waking from a dream and finding a stranger in my bed. All botanists know the eggs used to be held out on the edges of leaves, that over millenia they have curled in and sealed and slunk down into a pouch beneath the petals. They tell us it is adaptive to hide the most precious parts. Isn’t it true that any lover could satisfy my needs? Isn’t it true that all I am asking is for an exchange, a dusting of essence? How to make sense of all of these complicated mating systems, these expectations that even I don’t fully understand? Would I even be able to find myself beneath all of these elaborate structures of thought? I mean, sometimes her breath is like an animal’s, and suddenly she is just another human. We learn that philodendron, the plant on windowsills, in lobbies, on our kitchen counters, is really from the tropics. It creeps under the shade of rainforests in its juvenile state—as we have seen it, creeping on bookshelves, over radiators—until it finds a tree to climb, pushing through the top of the canopy in an explosion, leaves four feet wide and curving with joy. When we speak, even whisper, lips touching earlobes, my roomate stirs, the wood of the loft creeking like rain. There is this image hanging: an empty room full white light, a window, a bed for two. I catch myself sometimes, daydreaming about how the light will slide in and fill the space, stirring us to open the little holes in our skin, like stomates; how we will wake and stretch into radiance. >>index >>info >>advertisers >>contact