Apple: List 4

The Apple, tender and vulnerable, is the seat of Original
Skin. Some people grant inexplicable value or judgment
on saturation levels of either melanin or anthocyanin,
but once the skin is flayed, the insides are remarkably similar.

The Apple, tender and vulnerable, is the seat of Original
Skin. Some people grant inexplicable value or judgment
on saturation levels of either melanin or anthocyanin,
but once the skin is flayed, the insides are remarkably similar.

When we have this conversation, I’ve been
painting for years, but all of my models
are invented from vapor as transient as
our ghost breath on these cold November
nights.

His skin has maybe faded and chipped, and become weathered
and scarred like my own, from a botched surgery and the indignities
I’ve accrued as my years on this Earth slide and stretch into decades.

It’s mid-October and though the sun
washes the driveway stones in gold or iron pyrite,
the apple tree I used to climb has begun
to change its colors, let its undernourished
fruit drop to the ground for bees and bugs
that crawl, and one by one, give up its leaves
for another year, revealing its rough, arthritic
looking skeleton hidden for these months
by the tree's sad attempts to propagate.

Right now, I wouldn’t know what basswood or
Sweet Flag root looks like, or how to prepare them
anyway, even if I needed them and was astute
enough to remember what to do...

We still need to sing the blues
but in the intervening years
we have forgotten the chords
that would take us home, so
if you did commit them
to memory, even a couple,
could you pass them on?

Jaboozie delivers a lament like no one
I know, choosing exactly the sort of memory
to embrace loss...

My
brother just a few years older, surprises
me by listing, immediately, parts of
the main character's convoluted name.

And the money, yes, the money, goes into that fund called “The Nation,” and though I have never known the specific beneficiaries of that fund, I still buy overpriced water and frybread and Cornsoup because the taste of home is worth it and where else will I find it?

...those of us who smoke surrounding
you in blue swirls
of secondhand carcinogens...

He is a talented musician and is
accustomed to transposing one set of sounds
for another, one language for another.

Found: the place where my Las Vegas aunt’s house was razed
(also the place her grandson, my age, has built a new home)

We tell our stories in perpetuity.

If I could
rebuild our Dog Street house, who would
live there, knowing it wasn’t really the same,
but another inaccurate portrait from my past,
where I have decided which harsh edge to soften,
which memory to exhume and massage?