Even her eggs are camouflaged, laid like sins on a gray leaf, way up in the canopy of pink where legs like petals mount a bloom—a body buttressed by stems crawling over itself. Purple-red, splotches spilled lichen-like over the flap where the flora—pulseless and thin—unpeel their soft mouths and part their hip-lips. And then, its as though a hooked tongue lives inside her skin. Mandibles sink into the crisp disc of lavender-white flesh. Sepal-shaped, he has no choice but to bend beneath her wing-weight. She eats. Not the flower but her lover: her mate bowed inside out—turned over and tasted. Tongue like a dart emptying him out. Behind her, new buds gleam; pearl-petal wings forming—full of the future—curled within that florid foil.

-Michelle Detorie