Kate Bernadette Benedict

The Carrion Gardens

Welcome to this expo of plushy orchids.
Choke of blooms, the Fingers and Tongues among them.
Stenches on the breeze are their lewd attractants,
drawing the blowflies

buzzing to their spiky exposed labelli.
To your right, a barren expanse of mudflats
where a pond or rivulet harbored typhus,
drawing the vulture’s

claw to beasts who lucklessly came and lapped there.
Heap of bones, the skulls and the sacra strewn there
tell a tale of cryptical ancient epochs,
drawing the diggers,

rat-like people picking among the remnants.
Now this way: observe the forgotten warground
where the Grecian windflowers fall and perish.
Utterly quiet

but for buzzing flies and the hissing vapors.
Mound of bones, the skulls and the ulnae strewn here.
Something on the air from the blowsy orchids —
stenches of carcass.