Cock’s Comb

Goddamn there’s no way someone named a flower cock’s comb because what does that look like, something plastic guys slip in their back pockets, the handle sticking out, ladies knowing you mean business because you have your tight jeans on and your hair is always looking good, but not the hair on your head, the hair down there, because you have and flaunt a cock’s comb, which is somehow also a flower?

Didi says no, they mean the other type of cock, and I’m like, Ohhhhhh! That makes perfect sense … but it doesn’t because what kind of chicken carries a comb, though I figure immediately she means people use the comb, the chicken farmers, because chickens can’t comb their hair—no hands—but they still need combing, coops elbows-deep in bugs.

Didi points out that chickens don’t have hair, they have feathers, and still no, she means cockscomb, Latin: celosia, named after that red fleshy squiggle on roosters’ head, their manes, which chicken people call the comb, that type of cock, that type of comb, not what I’m thinking.

Didi planted the cockscombs—cocks’s combs?—around the lamp post, and I can confirm they look like the comb of a rooster, though whoever—whomever—named this flower could’ve named it rooster hair or rooster’s comb but they went for cock’s comb because it sounds dirty, provocative, and people like me, the non-gardeners, who might normally scoff at saying cock in a formal setting, in a public market, would have zero problem in this case because it’s a flower and talking about flowers is only implied-sexy, not in-your-face sexy, anti-subtle.

Didi says nobody is thinking of penises when they see her flowers and I disagree, insist she shouldn’t presume what people are thinking, that passersby (passerbies?) who see cockscombs in our yard and know what they’re called might have a giggle, like when I say pussycat or ball bearings, and how in the birds and the bees metaphor, the flowers are 100 percent the penises.

Here’s where Didi reminds me it’s not our house anymore, that the bees are the penises, and I need to stop driving by, stop calling her, stop asking about sexy flowers—the cockscombs and red-hot pokers and black negligees—about what she’s wearing; what the pussycats are up to; whose car’s in her driveway, and why she ever stopped loving me in the first place.