Eden, use your words
I never bit into
an apple. Instead I circled
a spot on one
with my inner
wrist until the spot was
soft enough
for this apple
to be placed on the dirt, its
veins emptied,
apple juice pooled,
its beet-red bodice becoming
unclear.
I could then
vocalise. I never spoke
until I wrote
my first words—
I never had the conversation
until that fruit
came along &
I made it look quiet
enough for it to
listen. I even
climbed trees before
I was a gardener.
Because there was
always a ferocity inside the
supple-worded child.
Ghost apples
It’s a darken cube, relatively stable, leapless
like truths, a shape with lines:
form. Whether I washed in the rain or I parted
it in the middle, the feathers
hang on the bones of my body in perpetual swing—
if you part my blood in the middle
you can hear the motion silenced by eternity,
an ivory curtain over my mouth.
I was raised to float above time & I am no better
than that ancient tear hanging
in me like golden wallpaper, the fruit bloom,
it’s never over, I’ve never moved
on— more akin to the type to float under the ice.
Dorothy Lune is a Yorta Yorta writer, born in Australia. Her poems have appeared in Overland journal, Mascara literary & more. She runs the substack Ladybug Central at dorothylune.substack.com