A fruit is really
just a seed and once it grows
and seeps with sweet blood
they will want to sink
carnivorous teeth into
its soft flesh. Wait too
long and that glowing
orb will fade and falter, shrink
to skin and spill its
insides, trickling
through heart and soul into thick
syrup; homemade jam.
Her first words were: fruit
and wine, a sangria of
simple phrases gleaned from
girls in garden chairs,
chatting at noon about high
school and hangovers;
their glasses of neat
Hennessy disguised as weak
tea. And years later,
her first hangover
would consist of watered down
whiskey, endless scoops
of Maraschino
cherries spread from sundown to
sunup. Juice from that
July night spots her
star printed sheets. When she
moves and stretches in
bed, an entire sky
exists beneath her back. That
boy, the one from trig,
starts tracing shapes on
her neck, needing her to know
he stayed all night. Just
wanting her and the
tart tang of the morning after.
The taste of all those
cherries and booze brand
his breath and make him recall
her lips crushed beneath
his, the heat of those
halogen lightbulbs. Now, one
flickers in the room,
sunlight peeks through her
faded yellow curtains, and
she still sleeps, and dreams
of him. She doesn’t
know how he will break her heart.
He wants the memory
of her body blanched
in moonlight, perfect and poised
for love. He’ll remember
her hair tickling his
face during the in-between
of bones and
bodies meeting. She’ll
keep the crescent tattoo of his
fingernails on her
shoulder, an imprint
left for infinite amounts
of boys who’ll
never see her that
way. She won’t let them tamper
with her tapestries
stitched from that one night.
Inside her, fields fill with a
faint forever. They
blossom with belief
for something better, straining
against her skin; his
seeds sown somewhere deep.
She will never know how much
he might’ve loved her.
And she will spill all
of herself two months later
at the clinic in
Westport, three towns from
home. And she’ll sink into her
sheets, counting every
constellation. Her
favorites: Cassiopeia
and Lyra. They’re such
pretty names for such
pretty girls soaked in stardust.
If it had been a
girl, that’s what she would
have named her. A galaxy
girl she could never
keep.