Drupe & bloom

Awareness isn’t living, boredom isn’t. A pit outgrowing the flesh it’s embedded in, is. Always plums and apricots in the kitchen, wet peels and puddles of juice, pulp on a knife. It’s impossible to get rid of the stone fruit weighing down the neutral psyche. There is no neutral psyche. Only tiny hairs on the skin of a peach. Eat! Eat, eat, whatever you like. Eat some of what you don’t like. Gather both sweetness and dirt onto your tongue. Try them seven times. Taste the living and the dead. Fruit is just the remnant of what flowers. What remains of fruit, ferments. Acquire a palate for the fizzy. For death and the dying and the lingering. Bottle it up. Then wait, wait. Wait until you dream of waiting, and time softens into boiling. Until the pressure builds, the glass cracks, the gasping escapes, explodes — my stars, what we do.

---

Carromancy

In the kitchen you pulled tarot cards

— I wanted tide charts. Loneliness 

seeks omen in loneliness.

Rain fell on the sea and I forgot 

to read the coffee dregs. Now, 

we will never know. What’s left: 

beeswax, lavender, engine heat 

of an old Ford pickup. Melting 

brittle yellow to shape 

and be shaped by believing 

mere heat and plasticity

make a marking bell. In 

the mangled tin can, flecks 

of lavender burn, fragrant and 

bombastic — steam escapes 

every undeclared future 

a bell inaudible in the static. Lighting, 

fire, tiny screaming bat, salvaged 

by a sweatshirt. Is it the heat or 

the hand that forms the wax? Motor oil 

or barnacle scraped from a hull

that forces fluidity. A wish 

in a wick. Stepping brazen into the sea 

smoke, listening to the clarifying 

bell — a stag call 

from the balcony. In candlelight, 

antlers make patterns as best 

as I can shape them.

---

KATE PYONTEK is a writer and artist living in New England. Their poetry is published or forthcoming in Poetry, Ecotone, Shō Poetry Journal, New Ohio Review, the lickety~split, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere.

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