cotyledon

apples smiled.

how the sour germination hangs on the teeth
when it's not whisky but sugar.

colts broken to wooden stems
their collars tugging bells and cracking leaves, and there's
a tarp to catch them as they fall
and the apple cellar's so slippery this time of year. but she's
not climbing stairs anymore. her back was growing backwards, where no river will
go, younger. she said, i am yellowjuice.

she hung woodenly from corkscrews
her eyes like cooling apple pies and
the sun shone through her, with the noise of a lonely accordion.

i saw a clock-hand counting her pockets and wondering what she'd brought.
illegal spires poked open a spigot to the roots
which turned cartwheels across her shoes.

her arms stole faithfully to baseball-bat-sunlight and potted themselves in the west colors.

she was climbing iron gates at six:
one upward swing and scramble,
a seizure in breath. i see her longings as they lie in a firstborn
swirl of casket flavored air. it forces itself into her delinquent
refusing nostrils.

photosynthesis attended with a doctor's purse. came late. rode a spiky horse in hours of precious sugarwebs. late but at least it came.

the warm saddles across her leaping shirt fluttered
and dissolved into hankies full of sun.

the world crested like a burial mound, stale and windless.

sucking like a lamb, still, at the faraway roofs across the gates,
she waved her limbs despite it all,
and sketched a pinnate escape.