Featured Image by Stephanie Leet.
Title from Amanda Ackerman’s The Book of Feral Flora.
I’m swimming in a horse’s eye as it is being carried to school
In pieces, in a wheelbarrow
Where your grandfather woke up kissing an apple hanging over a stranger’s head
Where the children are writing poems you may be reading now in translation from the French about alligators, hair, desire, family, cinema, the wind, music, hospitals, mother tongues, forked tongues, bitten tongues, tongues in cheeks, and other tongues
The children are wearing bright blue hats walking hand in hand together through a cemetery
They think nothing of life yet, don’t even mind waiting in a long line for death
They do not know hunger like I do as I stare into a bowl of salted cherry blossoms I’m afraid to eat because they are so beautiful
We feed ourselves fear and starve ourselves with delight
We free our thirst by suspending it above a cold black lake
We fill the thirst with tears and cramps from laughter
I killed the pan
It is dead now
I sing into it
You sing back to me from the hot coils of the stove cooking the broken eggs
I carry you home where there are instructions on the door to press your body against the cold wall and hang a plant from the ceiling unsuccessfully and dismantle the bathroom sink almost successfully and crack the living room mirror open with our eyes as big as they can be so we can breathe in the sound of seasons changing
We lose ourselves in an eye contact buffet
We lose interest at the ends of the bread loaf
We wake up urgent for early floral observations
We do what we can to catch every clever misnomer
You’re my real life target social media audience
We place salt from the bay in our mouths and spit out the roundest rock we can find
You fan out half of an avocado perfectly on the palm of my hand
I lift a key from the moon
It’s reaching to touch your cheek where an eyelash falls
I brush away this additional tenderness to make room for more
You dive into the shallow end of an umbrella deep inside the storm you reach in and pull out a penny
It shines
We are lucky again
Stacey Tran is a writer living in Portland, OR.
www.staceytran.com
