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In hot outbreath, I eat crow. Oh, to be the sunbeam and the air conditioning, the Heinz honey packet and the violet vinegar. I’m both, I’m sorry. I have made an enemy of high low. I’m this allegory, a coin collector, a story I’ve heard eight times in three years. In bodies less than perfect, there is a human desire to admire those who pray. My love has taught me genuflection — this inability to turn away, to break my gaze. It is summer and emergent candy blooms, sweets dog pile in greenery. It’s austere, though some will gorge themselves and a full-time drunk never really has to touch a drop. The easiest way to kill the desire is to give it permission.
Away from home, to be good is hard to explain. I float beyond abeyance. In sweet, tempered air, clandestine and belligerent, I become sworn to the worship of what’s in season. Strawberries seize the real money of my brain. Marissa says she first found god in the holes — things fit too perfectly to not be of some kind of glory. I first found god in snakes treading water with no legs, my own hungry lungs, a plastic mermaid trapped in a bottle of shampoo. While my heart is juiced to sin, I remember that I am a girl before I am an American. So, why can’t I whistle at night? I lock the door so no one else can see.
Who’s the saddest fruit?
God is always petting you
without permission.
