Her Death Meant Their Flowers

♦ Agustina Leon Perdomo ♦

Kids stood in their garms gawking at her on her knees.

She braced the fat of her stomach,

hand protecting intestines by molding them to its palm.

No other place closer to her viscera.

“Stay down, stay down.”

She spoke to her abdomen;

the determining factor between the boys evanescing

and wringing her dry.

The women’s internal dialogue:

savior of sanity.

Spoken thought:

the ultimate bondage to hysteria.

The boys wore plaid shorts with embroidered flowers;

an attempt on their mothers’ behalf to maintain the sons they curated long

ago, in a fair amber scrapbook geography.

The girl’s knees trembled,

small spots turned purple the longer she held down the

petals. Her core oscillated with a bilious rhythm,

her eyes turned red and watered,

hives covered her corporal manifestation,

as she prepared herself for the applause.

“Please, not now. Spare me today and I’ll be yours for another. Let my

blood serve as your soil a little while longer, it’s yours, I’m yours.”

Offered sacrifice:

desolate woman.

Complacency:

dead girl.

The weed showed no mercy.

She contorted in ways so slow they were almost still.

Moaning in pain, nails just perforating her integument,

the boys stood in awe.

They bolstered their appetite for what they’d been waiting for all day.

She sparred with herself on the pavement.

“No, no! Please, please no.”

She couldn’t help but oblige as the climax approached

and of her parted lips

fell a single petal.

The boys roared in gallant hoorah;

they knew there’d be more.

“C'mon just a little further! You’re almost there, don’t stop

now!” The teeth and tongues of boys clattered at her,

coordinating the siren song that would submit her further as she

coughed up an assortment of gardenias, poppies, and lilies. She

spewed obstreperously,

all she could do was counter the urge to gag;

feat turned unfeasible with branches prying at her uvula.

Wells sitting parallel the bridges of the boys’ noses ran dry

as their water renounced itself to the occasion.

“Beautiful.”

“Sole and idiosyncratic.”

And tears fell from the eyes of the girl as she sobbed at intervals of flowers.

Her frame undulated once her pain turned tacit

and the only attestation of her breathing was her gasps

between thorns.