Grasped a fistful from a recently cut
bag of rocket salad and I was caught in the sweet
viscous fingers of rot. What is the word
for an orange stone fruit
that somewhere
under its film skin
had started to burst
into a different black fruit?
That summer
I could have convinced myself
that it was a syllable-less groan
or that you could call
the follicular cabbage with a the dark curl on its ear
or a new softness
in the transparent layers
of its concentric heart
by the same name. My mother
cooks subzhi that drove here
some hundreds of miles
so I could freeze it. The freezer
is where I put things I want
so badly I can not bear to see them here
in front of me
already, now. I can stopper
the daily radius of rot
with keen ice and modern humming
technology
and I can be convinced
that in the yellow lurch of the water
and oil plastering their crystals
to the walls of the ziplock, that in the cells, actually
the rot has already taken hold,
mitochondria and blip of
nuclei new with a technicolor
not their own. As though matter hadn’t always
been churning to splotch, when I was younger and didn’t think
to worry about mold, my mother
would keep the potatoes and onions
through the floor below the kitchen,
in a plastic basket in the basement. This taught me
the decadence of necessities. I stood watching