Domestic
Rent from DeepDyve- Domestic
The third time you told menobody looked pretty;you, with your long eyes,me and my curled fingers;we walked with an orangeand one carton of milk.
My most interior knotkept the linoleum down.
Without it I would havepierced, my poreslike light throughan upturned orange leaf,the transparent and unpubescentoil glands of the familyRutaceae.
An orange fruit is ahesperidium, a kind of freak berry,because of its many seeds; becauseit is fleshy; because it derives froma single ovary.
Also orange: your sneakerson the plain without topographyon which I am trapped againwithout coverwith rattlesnakes and tigersat once after me, sliding on the same gray field [End Page 87] that slumps into gray sky of raptorsin this world with no edges.
The rind ground into tea is the wombthickening. An orange seeda pip. The white threadthe pith.
I am trapped in circles, following footsteps behindand forward, beasts that in the day I lovebecome my enemies. Only gray and some orangetiger stripes and my own feet orange, now.
All I have, the plague of plague of beasts.
Orange trees are grafted; the rootstockthe bottom. The fruit-top the scion.Unripe fruit is not orange. [End Page 88]
Laura Jane Martin is a writer and ecologist. Her work has appeared in Fourth River, Cider Press Review, Scientific American, Science, and other journals. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
