I feel like no one ever wants them
I think maybe she is feeding them
The black fish in her hands
but her shirt says mother.
and the background
looks fine with it.
Her basket is full
And her hands are full
There’s too much
heavy fruit
to deal with
and it’s so overly yellow
There is a caterpillar
on the ground
and the frog does not look like a frog
Or the mouse rabbit dog thing
about to get hit
I think it’s about the bearing of fruit
and its responsibilities
And the stress of abundance
or the desire for it
The tree is advancing
without them
The fruit
is so huge
and muscular
or bulbous
It’s not clear the gender of fruit
but it’s drawn in a way
where it’s full on
Also the basket
seems subtly bloody
it seems to speak
What kind of fruit is it?
They are not clearly pears
They could be lemons
or squash
They seem to be
They are falling off
because they are ripe
or ready to be taken.
There is one woman,
one rabbit dog,
one frog man,
one caterpillar,
one energetic tree
That’s the color of paper
The situation is floating
you have to deal with the intensity
of this moment
She lived in a rural place
and used mud
to make her own clay
She had a very disturbing
medical situation
where she was pregnant
and did not give birth
and never really dealt with it
or didn’t know how
or had bad care
But she retained the fetus
it stayed inside her
so she was sick
from this
Are they moving a boulder with their noses?
I always think that’s the sun
I don’t know
what her life
was like.
Maybe something else happened.
I heard she gave herself an abortion
by drinking lye
but then took on the look
of a pregnant woman afterward
They said the fetus calcified.
I might be remembering
a little wrong
but its somehow in there
when you look.
The trees seem imagined
by the woman
And she really makes you wonder
is this finished?
The combination of fantasy
and hard reality
is something
The sun seems to have crashed to earth always
Sometimes people seem invisible
They are
There’s this place that is open
to everybody
She is openly, rudely thinking
You are the birds
The walk
Might be able to get one pear for cheap
since it’s so
and makes people question
what is.
She is wearing the wrong shoes
for that work.
Or maybe
the chunky heels are good
so she can reach more pears.
Published in The Brooklyn Rail: https://brooklynrail.org/2020/04/poetry/two-Core
