Dissolving Pearl 3 (Excerpt)
Beheading roses in May.
Delicate you
Peeling fruit inside of a dark room.
Licking your knife, dressing a deer.
A liar in the afternoon.
Fade.
Linear and ordered.
You lean into my ear and tell me about
the morning your mother released your pet python into your front yard.
You would fall asleep with it as a baby coiled in your small shared bed. One night your mom saw the python straightening its body stiff next to you as you slept. This was to see if the snake had grown long enough to at last swallow you whole. She didn’t know this was a trained and carefully intended act taught by you.
You watched the python devour itself in the garden by noon, peak sun. You break your collarbone falling out of the now-empty bed the next night.
Peeing on the heads of neoclassical stone sculptures of men.
Dissolving a pearl.
(Later) Delicate you is back, with your knife and your peach. Your hair has grown longer.