The Most Beautiful Things Sting

by Elizabeth Rosen

Like the Blue-Ringed Octopus, tiny cloud of blue-and-yellow flesh, rolling, flowing through the shallow waters of the coastal tide pool, turning on itself like cream in coffee, swaying arms a hypnotic siren-call, its bite painless. Iridescent rings flashing watchwatchwatch as your breathing shuts down.

Like the Angel’s Trumpet, slim and bell-shaped, hanging overhead like unfastened umbrellas, light diffusing through the delicate membranes, a glory, a lullaby, touch me. Pastel peach with blush borders, fin-de-siècle mauve, rich carnelian inviting smell me, the lightheadedness of its sweet scent not your imagination, but a precursor to the hallucinations, the quickening thump in your breast not joy at its beauty, but the toxic pollen on your stroking fingers stopping your heart, eyes going dim as the angels call you home.

Like the Monarch Butterfly, rust-and-mustard panes of its wings black-bordered, stained glass in flight, slow beating of wings as it rests quietly between the branches, devourers of milkweed, a shock of beauty as they crawl from their cocoons to greet the new day. Eat me. Vomiting, visual disturbances, the leisurely flapping of wings the last thing you see while your heart slows…stops.

Like the tiny cone snail, chestnut whirls in calcium, art deco masterpieces of the seabed, lose yourself in the multitudinous designs of their inverted cone and spires, harpoon-tooth hidden inside to launch against the unaware. Go ahead, pick me up. Numbness and tingling, paralysis, respiratory failure.

Colorwise, Elizabeth Rosen is an autumn. Music-wise, anything heavy on synthesizer with a lot of eye-liner from the early ’80s will do. She can be found anywhere books congregate.