Gaping Yawp

I’m ripe with danger and loss. Others have told me I hold violence like I’m cultivating a babygreen seedling, but I never believed them until now. You could try to pluck me from the tree but it takes no force, I will fall off into your hand. Don’t make a fist, juice will spill down to your elbow, stain more than any wine. And then the loss of limbs, branches destroyed by beetles and careless swings of an axe. A bronzed arm over the mantle because I asked you for it, and you said okay.

Harbor: choose anything but harbor—more like a cauldron. We boil and toil and burn from the inside out. I am no refuge, no dirty inlet with a dike sheltering from sea monsters. I am the sea monster, I am the barnacles on the underbelly you have to dry dock to deal with. I thought I was more for you than you ever received from any cracker jack box, more than a surprise plastic toy, don’t you know how to decipher my usage? But I lost the instruction manual long before we met. Threw it into the surf. Burned it at fahrenheit 451. My trees grow weary of giving up their paper so easily, but they have nothing else to give.

You gave me bloodlust, a hunger for the darkest taste of me, and there’s no turning back. I can’t undo the danger I offered up, my ripe organs eager for your piercing. Give me more. Open up an apple sideways so the seeds make a star. Dive into the honey thick with bees and sunshine. Liquid greens, that color of new growth, any time the daffodils die and birds start turning one glassy eye to the tundra of the north. Come to where the herring are abundant, bubbles caught in the air waiting to explode in a gaping yawp of need. Don’t we all have it, that bottomlessness, that sexy darkness that links back to when we were born. Birth is the real loss of the only time we are truly one with another. Isn’t that, under it all, the only thing anyone ever wants?