The Evening Primrose is anything but
prim. I blush at its frank availability—

the fleshy stigma, swollen and sticky, that reaches
beyond a yellow hem of heart-shaped petals,

drool in the night air and sacs of scent pumped
loud as house music. The smell of damp earth,

blood of the gods, rises under a ruddy buck moon.
I am waiting for the arrival of a sphinx moth,

which I have never seen. I am not a true creature
of the night. Not at ease with the beetle

laboring toward nectar glands, nor with globs of pollen
dropped and drifting on ghostly sheets.

I draw my coat around my knees even as I whisper
my poems to this floating world.