ART BY EMMA SELESNICK

I.
Among strawberry flesh and bones from birches
there is my heart:
a cardamom seed.
She has waited her whole life to be kissed by the pestle,
a most romantic kind of weight,
and crushed into shards.
To bring someone a sweetness—
that transient pleasure
washed over by a bitterness
one must learn to enjoy,
acquire a taste for, so to speak
—too soon forgotten.

II.
The first time I was patient:
for nectarines in April.
Taunting suns in the black wire bowl on the cold marble counter,
the only time we could all agree on something—
that waiting.
That dripping flesh
to be indulged in over the sink.
Reward for aimless days spent—
latent period—
insistent thumbs
gently crawling across
hairless freckled carmine skin,
searching for the first sign of
readiness or
perhaps initiating decay.

III.
Placed alongside plush fruit
whose skin approaches rupture;
minute by second
most by more,
a final orange teeters on rot.
Cardboard is suffocating,
ethylene, effused and clutched as precious
haunts radiant pocked skin, enters with
no permission and thaws that perfect configuration of flesh.
Bitter pith
tries in earnest to contain,
to perform its only purpose.

My mother only wants to keep me alive—
that’s not what I mean.
I mean
she wants other things too—
joy and sleep and my spine free from spiders.

She means no harm in ripeness.