Spitting Daisies

The following six poems are final drafts from my creative writing poetic technique class

I can feel your almond eyes across my braided back

watching like the tabby cat who stalks its prey.

I thought you were a book on my shelf 

that was already read,

words rotting like a ripened pear.

I used to sew you up with tangerine rinds

and incase you in the crevices of my mind

 but you would only fester and die.

Is that why I left?

Because birds can’t fall out of the nest and return

back to the red wood trees.

And butterflies can’t build cocoons to transform again.

But the fruit fly can eat the clementines once the rind has burst.

When the lonely shoes find themselves sticky with traces of 

cider and crooked eyes and crooked smiles, 

I can feel like a boomerang.

I keep thinking of these things.

The memories of you unfolding 

between my pinky toe and the other.

The crevices holding you like 

the synapses in my mind.

I can still taste you like the

ripened pear on my tongue.

The smell of apple blossoms

as they unfurl for the first time in spring,

the pollen flying to catch the wind.

I pick you up from my thoughts,

a forgotten spider floating in the pond.

A memory as rotten as milk.

Rotten as a child who snatches the nest

and crushes it beneath his feet,

while the mother watches from the jasmine tree.

You are a beetle who sits in my mind

and eats the rind off of every clementine.

The white tabby cat curls in the yellow wild flowers

like a fetus that lives in a woman’s dress.

You also peek between the sweet grass dripping dew,

the stench of mildew growing like the scent of

milk rotting in a glass on a windowsill.

I bite into the clementine, bursting the rind between my teeth,

the acid spreading across my tongue as you say,

“You will carry my babies one day”.

But all I can hear is the sounds of your voice spreading

like the screeching b flat from the birds in the trees.

You can’t touch me between my legs

I am not pure, I am pure

My stomach cramps like the knotted roots below

I can feel the tree trunk let out its breath

as I let my circadian rhythm free fall.

The estrogen collecting beneath my stomach bursts

and I am raining crimson.

My bottom is a pear that you

stroke like spreading butter on the

toast you eat every morning.

The honey melts off the edges

like saliva off my tongue, as I

watch your back while you 

dip your feet into the tub. 

We aren’t a pod you say,

and I say, “Honey, why do we have to be anything?”

my voice echoing off the vinyl 

floors down to the neighbors

we hear making love at six a.m.

You pare me in half like the kitten

who yanks out the wires and I am electrocuted.

Like the roots below, “we grow, we grow” I scream.

Your uneasy stares into the mirror reflect the 

fork in the road. I look outside to see my

confusion hanging down the laundry line.