Carnations | Alex Cooper
Photo by Aleksandra Sapozhnikova on Unsplash
A piece about love as an enduring act of defiance and personal rebellion. It is about continuing to choose self-love and to practice giving love in spite of the harm done by individuals who would use that trust and openness against a person. Choosing love in defiance against a wider society that would brand that love as unnatural, but still it flowers.
These are the flowers that grow from my chest, these are the flowers that crack through the stones of my ribs, against the castle of my skeleton and which grow in defiance of the magpies that circle above. These are the flowers that grow from my chest, and they are the flowers that will grow on my gravesite when I am finished telling stories. They say that written on the body is a secret code, the story of a lifetime, but sown in the soil of the soul are the seeds of it all.
These are the flowers I keep closest. Their stems have a chokehold on my lungs, and maybe that is why I cannot breathe so well. Wouldn't that be romantic? Their buds are what form my heart, and perhaps that is why it runs in double time. Their fruits are what fill the cavities of my core. They are the flowers I keep the closest, and yet I gather them, and I pluck them, and I offer them to you. The tender fruits have ripened, the peaches and mangoes, the bananas and the orange. I let you pick the fruit and gather the seeds of me, to take the stems of me into you. I encourage you: sink your glazed teeth into those peaches and drink the juice of me, the nectar is yours. Eat of me until your mouth is covered in love and sap drips down your neck. Swallow the seeds of me, take my essence from your mouth to your heart, and there a sapling of me shall grow evergreen for you. Take the cuttings of what you find the most delicious, keep your golden curl, it is my pleasure. These are the flowers that grow from my chest, this is the garden that mocks Eden, these fruits are not forbidden, I give them freely: this love I curated for myself must be shared, and I deem it go to any who wants it.
The flowers have their roots in my brain and maybe that is why I cannot sleep, maybe that is what causes the dreamlessness. The hours I am to spend dreaming are instead spent on blooming. Is that the cost of a heart juicy with love? I'd pay it a thousand times over, the dark grows slow and mossy, cold and rotten, so that the light may be shining and warm and full of colour. These are the flowers that grow from my chest, and perhaps they are rhetoric, but there is no alternative, the petals of me are on show for all to see and for anyone who wills it to pluck. This can be a dangerous life, to live with one’s fruits in the air. There have been those who trim carelessly, such as he who excised all in me that he did not want to see and sought to reshape my fields in his image. He who took advantage of my bounty and stripped the branches of me bare. They are only human, all things are subjective, even myself. It would be tempting, then, to replace those delicate blooms and ripening fruits with nettles and rafflesia, with pitcher plants and venus fly traps - to lash out against their pesticidic wants, to make my fields barren and volatile. But that would be self-flagellation: that would be no garden to be proud of, no fruit to share, it would grant those careless ones their victory. I am worth more than that. Perhaps it is selfish of me, but I cannot deny myself the serene scent of lavenders and the gentile blooms of magnolia. Perhaps that is my weakness, a hedonistic fixation on love. But that is what I am built for, that is the point of me. I was put on this Earth simply to love. I mentioned that the roots of these flowers lie in my brain, and this is true. That is where all the love I have for myself resides: such self-love is a learned behaviour. The flowers that grow from my chest grow from that love. So, for my own sake, I shall not salt my earth, nor wilt my heart, nor peel my lungs free, I shall not tear the roots from my brains even if it would let me dream of the sea. That would be no life.
Despite it all, flowers grow from my chest still and still carnal flowers beat through my veins, and every once in a while, there are those with touches so gentle; their fluttering fingers dance along the vine and tickle the grapes, those with tongues that know the stalks of cherries. Those who take cuts of me not conquer me nor to claim this garden as their own, but who clip to preserve, to love. Their sapcovered tongues beckon those strewn boughs into life. So I gather them in bunches, the flowers that grow from my chest: the pinks and blues and reds and hues of stories too taboo to be told. With your purple carnation on the apple in my throat.
About Alex
They/them
Alex Cooper is a Stoke-on-Trent-based queer and disabled English Literature graduate whose stories focus on interacting with a world that was not built with people like them in mind. Their work has previously been featured online in Tealight Press.
Instagram: @alex.thepoet / Twitter: @AlexthePoet3
