Orchid Orgasmic

Client: Personal

Software: Adobe Photoshop CS5

Notes: People tend to generalize nature as passive, calm, and zen. This is an attempt to portray flowers in a more charged setting and to explore sensuality. Orchids are bursts of complex formations and varied color schemes nestled on simple green leaves and stalks. They are difficult to care for but have always captured the imagination -- they currently enjoy status as symbols of sexuality and virility. Interestingly, orchids have a bizarre sex life -- either luring honeybees into pollination or engaging in self-reproduction. A study reads, ""Here we describe a new type of self-pollination mechanism in the tree-living orchid Holcoglossum amesianum, in which the bisexual flower turns its anther against gravity through 360° in order to insert pollen into its own stigma cavity — without the aid of any pollinating agent or medium."

"Open Letter to Eros" by Simone Meunch

I want a love that is imprecise, one
that sprawls over the bed, spills out windows,
disrupting churchgoers as they stroll
across the green glow of mowed lawns. I want
a love that commandeers the world, a bone-
clanking, hydrant-splashing, dog-
salivating affair. The ravaged and
the ravenous — those lycanthropes of lust.

No candy hearts or delicacies
of language. Do not ask me
to be demure, clean or to go
with the flow. I am electric.
I sprinkle poison
in the bird feeder, watch blue jays
fall like insatiable kisses.

I want fuck and prick
and cunt. Those delicious monosyllables
of want. I want you in a chair
handcuffed and desiring me so badly
even your feet are on fire. I want
love that is black as a highway
on a starless night, black as madness, sable
smooth and impenetrable. I want love
to write a love poem to me
with bad intentions.

Love is my nemesis,
my neurosurgeon, the unruly
child, the car that won’t steer
straight, the boy on a skateboard
carving the street
into attraction and repulsion.

I want a love that is contradictory, indelible
and edible, a love that relishes
imperfections and requisitions the moon.
A love that isn’t afraid of grief, sadness,
the small crimes we commit
against ourselves; love as cool
as a bruise, sensitive as skin
on eyelids, nipples and ears.

I want a love that listens:
to rain a half mile
before it hits the house; to the feather
brushing sound of morning glories as they close
their petals for rain’s arrival; the soft
shuffle of beetles as they begin a slow
crawl across the orchard into the sweet
red bellies of fallen apples.