Madison Bigelow
You made chicken or fish. I can’t recall,
but I see your hands cradling a casserole dish
covered in cornflowers;
Hot days tripped into carbonated nights.
We took spoonfuls of citronella
yellow like medicine to cure the bubbling sun trapped
under skins &severed cork bobbed in the bottle but I didn’t mind—
something to chew on
&I am thinking of gentler times: considering
the evening last summer in your backyard. Rolling it against my teeth,
elbows perched on the table &I remember
how mine slipped across its rutted top.
I predicted tetanus; instead
my arm was covered in a creeping blued patina that framed wound’s edges
heartbeat visible through the skinned flesh.
You tended to me with two fingers hooked
&scooping aged muck from the canyoned cut. We laughed.
It was so odd, the evening tomatoing us a seedy, pulping hemorrhage.
The mosquitos took a sample as we eclipsed our own ripening.
We will both bleed for finer reasons by the end of this year.