Back to Issue Twenty-Three.

Forbidden Fruit

BY HEATHER COX

Beer belly of summer. You can’t remember

the last time your mouth wasn’t pregnant

with peach pits. Sweat beading in the crook

of your arm, you cut the lawn with a mower

older than your grandfather. The night felt

like an elegy, the morning like a handful

of hymns someone sang to you from atop

a mountain. Everything in between

blurred like steam rising from pavement.

Everything in between was her hands—

her hands were in between everything. Her lips,

red ripe like cherries eager to plummet

from the tree. Dirt roads and riverbeds, summer

felt like eternity, a gift not even a god

could take away, no matter how hard you sinned.

The necks of dandelions purpled, but you

had your own palate for bruising. You

discovered how to cut away rot without

spoiling the fruit. You trained your taste buds

to tell you what you needed to hear, puckering

despite her nectar baptizing your tongue.

Self-Portrait as a Vessel for Debris

BY HEATHER COX

after Natalie Diaz

I.

I am what I am. I brought forth swarms

or I am a vessel for swarms. Your ear

to my chest nearly deaf from the buzzing.

I never loved a man, but I let him love me

in the back of his pickup, parked

on the clay road of the cemetery. I was

dead then. I was skeletal. Someone else’s

skin clung to my bones. I’d open

my mouth and hollyhock would fall out,

black magic. I’d open my legs, the gate

to the cemetery swung wider. I am a vessel,

my body was a temple for destruction.

My mouth prayed on her lips in the locker

room. My hands prayed, my knees, each

strand of hair. Grape juice tickled my

tongue, carpet burned my knees, a wafer

grew limp between my teeth. I begged

in every language I knew for her

to love me. Love me sideways, upside

down, and inside out. I prayed to each

freckle on her too-tan cheeks. Little

River baptized the others, but I stayed

dry as dust. My mouth tried to convert her

for worship, but such a lost sheep. She never

bowed to my waist for a taste of holy water.

II.

I am what I am, and I am your god.

I swallowed the rainbow, chased it

to the alpha, the omega, and someone

swiped the pot of gold, if it ever existed.

I am myth. I am a magician. I am

a two-sided coin. Tails or heads?

I used to be dead. I was born again.

Now I’m unborn and unbroken, hodgepodge

lodged in one being, one body. My flesh:

a crime scene, a catalog of debris. I am

a walking catacomb. The first time

I died. How could you think that

was living? A gaggle of ghosts swarm

inside me, unnamed. The Gospel of Nothing

is what brought you here, now worship.

III.

I pledged allegiance

to Nothing

and I signed on the dotted line.

I cut on the dotted line. I cut out

the gut, the rot, the rut of the mutt life I lived.

I lick my wounds, the memory of my wounds

licked by others. I am an altar. I pray to myself. I am

Church of Resurrection, called back from beneath

a bottle of tiny white bullets to the redemption

of her thighs. She is the Chapel of Reciprocation.

IV.

The doors are always open. I am Cathedral

of Burn the Cowboy Boots with the Barn.

Burn this inscription into your other

inscriptions. Burn the face of the night

so it resembles the day. This day, this daily

bread. I praise the bees for fleeing the hive.

I drip with honey. Belly, a nest of stingers.