Phlebotomy with Meyer Lemons, and: Elegy for Paul, Who Died without a Stomach

Phlebotomy with Meyer Lemons

I can’t look at a lemon and not think

about heroin. At sixteen, the twotimes I shot up: once

when I missed the green spaghetti-vein

that jumped in my elbow’s crook and oncewhen I hit it and watched the backwash of blood

flush in the syringe’s barrel. My boyfriend’s cousin

taught us how to shoot—nursing schooldropout just out of jail who laughed

at his stepmom’s bichon frise

after he dosed the dog with acid and the whimperingfluffball spun circles

through the kitchen. He made us practice

injections on a lemon. Whenwe got used to poking

a needle through skin—bevel side up, angled

thirty degrees—we stuck ourselvesin a patch of suburban Virginia woods at night,

then staggered, puking and ecstatic,

through the playground at Laurel Ridgewhere I hung, stomach-down,

on a swing. I left my high-school boyfriend

after the chokehold, after the art bookshe threw into the street. I left before

he became a full-time junkie. How can I live

with three lemon treesnow potted in terracotta on my patio? At the plant

nursery in Los Angeles, my husband and I passed

the Meyer lemons and couldn’t believetheir scent: cocktail sugar rimming

a vodka lemon drop. When the woman watering

seedless mandarins in the next row came over,she said the Meyer lemon’s skin is sweet

enough to eat as she ripped off a piece

of peel. I couldn’t believe how thinits skin felt, how soft. I couldn’t believe

that bite wasn’t bitter.

Elegy for Paul, Who Died without a Stomach

What kind of dude, at twenty-eight, makes butternut squashsoup on Friday night? You, Paul:

grad student, poet, former chef. You knewto add Spanish onion, unsalted butter, thyme,

heavy cream, a bay leaf. You knew,before baking, to drape each

halved squash in thin pancetta. I didn’t knowa person could even put

cooked squash in a blender. I didn’t breakup with my boyfriend then

but I made him stayhome the night of your whiskey-

tasting party. Although whiskeymakes me mean, makes me

throw things, I came anyway,sipped whatever

peat-and-vanilla burnin a tumbler you poured. Forty, Paul,

is an unacceptable age to diefrom stomach cancer, from

anything at all. After your death,I read your food blog, your last recipe:

lamb tenderloin with herbspätzle and radishes. In the photo

of the finished dish, you’d spreadten fillets in symmetrical rows: five

on each side so the mirrored cutsformed a ribcage over plump

German dumplings. I oncewrote your red

cowboy boots into a poem, imagineda leather fetish. I brought the piece

to class, hoped you’d notice. I left outyour Roman nose, your laugh

that was actually just a stutteredexhalation of Camel smoke, your grey

rescue tabbies named in nerdyhomage to the English Romantics.

What the fuck, Paul?Forty? I know I apologized long ago

for that time at Rudyard’s pubwhen I was drunk: I’d said Lord

Byron was boring and you’d leanedforward, shaken the ice-melt in your glass’s

watered-down bourbon. What are you,an anti-intellectual? I’d slapped

your left cheek. Paul, I never told youthat after your whiskey party, I returned

to my apartment to find my loverhad hidden

all of the knives. I say this now—inappropriately and far

too late—as a sort of compliment,and because I’d rather picture those steel

blades tucked awayinstead of your yellowed face

swollen from chemo-bloatin late photographs, or that gourmet

squash soup you stopped makingafter the gastrectomy. You once told me

you used a spoon to scoop all the softbakedflesh from the skin of the gourd.