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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