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.

Illustration of two hands opening an orange with many white and yellow flowers behind it — Illustration by Weshoyot Alvitre

poetry-magazineArs Poetica: Ambulthiyal Abecedarian

poetry-magazineOrange Tree

Ars Poetica: Ambulthiyal Abecedarian

Orange Tree