The Prickly Fix of the Hoary Puccoon by Emily Abendroth

: The Prickly Fix of the Hoary Puccoon :



Antsy, and visited by ants, the five-lobed calyx balances. With an easy glub, the plant secretes its chub, loosing by dewy cue the flubber of its moist substance. It glances upon stranger neighbors with four hard nutlets, cutting a route – by stout taproot – into the shoal of loam. Handily, it combs from the domed soil a home that first bemoans and minerally resists the fisty entry of its narrow-boring tendrils, their formidable brood of surface-intruding botanical mandibles.


An able and unshorn form – both hirsute and hungry – the hoary puccoon’s uppersides provide for all allies an eye supper of the ciliate; its nelly underbelly a jellied crestlog of white pubescence. Of no particular menace, today, a pair of squat coots is afoot at its footings. Scooting there, restlessly.


In messier times, the pestilent and grimy molars of equally hoary children would grind the red puccoon’s root – mutely – with a thick lick of pitch gum, determined to plumb and color their own mouths to a gooey, lewd maroon. Switching at noon, as they always did, to a masticating bid for ochre. Raucously soaking their teeth anew; placing the great sunbelt stew of the pelt of puccoon flowers into their sour and chomp-sore orifices in order to inch the very same oral pitchwad into an auroral catchgob of golden-yellow. Impressing their gawking and limber fellows with the fetching visual roar of amber organ décor.


For any living body, however regal its vestments, the need to wiggle and pigment oneself is still prolonged and strong; indeed, it smells so. Glowing with an uncouth exuberance, the youth chew and chew and chew. Moving the tubular pompon of bloom into their own roomy, unpruned summer intestines. Therein, with no lessening of desire, to toil in the coy company of bastard toadflax and the white-eyed grasses. Until lastly, upon leaving, the puccoon leaves in their slender toothlessness, in their tender serrate-absence, incensed, bend down to frisk and tickle all.


click here to learn about the Hoary Puccoon Lithospermum canescens
Boraginaceae (Borage family)