Orange Tree
Our neighbor’s orange tree is in full bloom fat and overgrown and spilling
sun-bright fists over our fence onto our quiet
shouts of scutch grass sugaring tender rot over our anemones
which hardly grew all spring because my father chose a fertilizer
with the wrong pH and wrong mineral content
my father figures that since half of the tree is on our side half
of the fruit belongs to us though our neighbor has lived longer than
the two of us combined and the tree longer than him
still on a Sunday we gather beneath its wild knot of leaves steal fruit after
fruit tear their rinds and shove their segments down our chronic mouths
my father smiles all his teeth crooked and stained like shards of terrible
sunlight bursting from his gums and I share his ugly find it one day
years later ghosting his car’s silver hood furling under the heat his nose
blooming onto my nose his yolk-bright eyes instead of my eyes his neat
ribbon of dark lips reaming over mine my father a smear of silt and wood
-worm over denim clean shaven until he stops until his beard threads in
through his jaw thick as a tooth of basalt dark as one too dark as the one
we found together in a field with no volcano in sight even he religionless
then admitted it was a sign and I found him a month later in the shed palm
-sized photo of his mother trembling in his hands like a fledgling
my father whiskey sour and smoke-balmed in the dawn light gout globing at his
ankle my father cyst blinking and blinking at his front lobe rust chewing at his
faux Rolex until it turns to dust Alchemy my father calls it before fogging dirty
sable rings onto my mother’s cheek with his wrist as he brushes away her hair my father
who has only ever heard of simple fruits like apple peach and pear never the tangerines
and persimmons of my poems who knows more about the war than I ever could
who watched his brother drown and his village burn the trees falling one
by one like piano keys struck for the first time and I am his
cruel son reaching for an orange beneath his baffling frame bruised
shoulders wide as sky son who’d sew his suffered life into all my poems
write the man with the broken accent and broken hands I promised I’d never become but how could I
have known how could I have known anything at all that in the end
I would only finish as his failed ugly understudy our biology knitted wicked like this
a violent alchemy lurking in both our luckless lungs but this is allcountless gnat-bridled Augusts away
right now we are alive and together my father and I wondering how
the smell of jasmine and citrus can come from the same tree chewing stolen fruit
spilling the pulp
laughing at the mess we are making with just our hands.
Source: Poetry (January/February 2025)