Pomegranates |
And, today, her name is the pomegranate pearl I hold in my mouth. Today, she calls from Costa Mesa and says she’s writing about having black hair, green eyes. Says someone asked of her new poem, Are you from Islam or something? tried to correct himself: Are you from Muslim or something? She walks another lap around the block, pauses to sniff the jasmine winding up a neighbor’s trellis, to pet the pitbull panting behind the chain-link. The waves lap up the rocks, working to win the land back. She says she keeps thinking back — to the night we jumped the fence to the plum orchard, her eyes fixed on the hills, waiting for the brushfire. Back then we thought love was all broken-open pomegranate, juice dripping down our palms. That night, she asked me to describe her eyes, and I thought of clover. How much I’d wanted the meadow of her, to finger the shapes her freckles made. Look, she breathed. I want to reach out and touch it. She was looking at the sky. I was looking at her hand. |