Aron Wiesenfeld, “The Grove”

Natalie Diaz

She twirls it in her left hand, a small red merry-go-round.

According to the white oval sticker, she holds apple #4016. I’ve read in some book or other of four thousand fifteen fruits she held before this one, each equally dizzied by the heat in the tips of her fingers.

She twists the stem, pulls it like the pin of a grenade, and I just know somewhere someone is sitting alone on a porch, bruised, opened up to their wet white ribs, riddled by her teeth— lucky.

With her right hand, she lifts the sticker from the skin. Now, the apple is more naked than any apple has been since two bodies first touched the leaves of ache in the garden.

Maybe her apple is McIntosh, maybe Red Delicious. I only know it is the color of something I dreamed, some thing I gave to her after being away for ten thousand nights.

The apple pulses like a red bird in her hand— she is setting the red bird free, but the red bird will not go, so she pulls it to her face as if to tell it a secret. She bites, cleaving away a red wing. The red bird sings. Yes, she bites the apple and there is music— a branch breaking, a ship undone by the shore, a knife making love to a wound, the sweet scrape of a match lighting the lamp of her mouth.

This blue world has never needed a woman to eat an apple so badly, to destroy an apple, to make the apple bone— and she does it.

I watch her eat the apple, carve it to the core, and set it, wobbling, on the table— a broken bell I beg to wrap my red skin around until there is no apple, there is only this woman who is a city of apples, there is only me licking the juice from the streets of her palm.

Lelies  22   -   Margot Olde Loohuis

Dutch, b. 1973  -