After Florida’s Six Week Abortion Ban Takes Effect
The mail courier comes to the door to say she’s been watching
the peach tree for weeks, so I give her the fruit I’m most jealous of.
A friend’s analysis: You gave up a responsibility
I think? Or you gave away your vice. Now it’s delivered.
It’s early May. I pick peaches in the dark by smelling the red cheek.
I think I could have kids like this. Probably the most mundane
thing to do in early summer. Everything right now feels heavier than it looks
and that’s how I know it’s time to eat. I take fruit to the airport
to sweeten my appeal, but really, I distribute the raw fruit
so I don’t have to plan for the future. The airport
is on the other side of the forest. When I drive through at 4 a.m.
I can’t distinguish the tree tops from the night sky so the trees
take on an impossible height. I count 15 deer before I stop
counting. She asks, are 200 peach pits not enough? I say, I could eat,
though I’ve reached the point where any unripeness erodes my tongue.
Like the brand of candy we ate in the early 2000s and celebrated
for its total destruction, as we ourselves engaged in new warfare.
Then, I thought peach was not a possible Warheads flavor because
lemons and watermelon and apples are more transportable, more war-like.
This week, the U.S. Navy is engaged in live and inert bombing
in the Ocala National Forest, movements not far from where I live.
On Facebook, a man calls them “freedom seeds.” Mine too, is a comparison
that undercuts the exercise being prepared. Which is more violent?
The answer should be obvious, but I’m concerned lately
by how I grew up eating candy with a whitehead exploding
into a small mushroom cloud and how this is typical
of settler-colonial order—so much so that I don’t recognize the bombs
as bombs, but as something innocuous and natural, with a future.
The most terrifying deer are the ones in motion—doesn’t matter
if they’re moving away from the road or toward it.
My Mother Says I Never Learned Language
Because she didn’t want to speak to herself.
Which makes it sound like I have no language.
I know about noise, endlessly
human. The first thing I said today
was welcome. I woke up before anyone
else in my house and in one version
I say welcome to my own little animal
scampering to its breakfast
and in another I speak to open
the doors of the office. Both have happened.
Some days, the first thing I say is a decree:
French toast or tea or I think we should go
to Tasti-Os, even if the donuts are fried at midnight
and wait in the window until dawn. I know for sure
I would have lost whatever my mother might have said
over her infant. I am also quiet and distrustful.
I have not learned to convey
anything more than meaning, and I think
when she says I never learned language
she worries I will be lonely. On the way back
from work I call Mom
to describe a new bag of rocks by the railroad
crossing. Someone else’s
mysterious labor. I am envious of it,
a new bag every week. Cumulative. I want
that certainty and perhaps, to know what’s coming.
Note: An earlier version of “My Mother Says I Never Learned Language” was published by Waxwing
Yonder
Light breaks the window. You don’t recognize light
as a hard hitter. Moonlight moonlighting as meteorite,
curtain rod come loose, cabinet collapsed at dawn, a sign
you must go out into the world, received by the reproduction
of gardenias and orange blossoms hungry for visitors.
Love bends the balcony in water weight. Once,
a neighbor cried out for help, collapsed under the collapsed
trellis of passion flowers. Maybe the best omen
for moderation is the thing we love pinning us down.
I check the value of my house on Zillow. My house moonlights
as a more expensive house online. Even the comfort of numbers
scares me. Then there is the comfort that the end of us isn’t the end.
Note: “Yonder” first appeared in print in The American Poetry Review
