How To Eat Fruit

Standing over the sink
she bites into the peach
and for a moment
the fruit remembers her mouth

the oval left behind
holding each tooth separately

their impressions preserved in the flesh
with a fidelity her body hasn’t learned to manage

for her jaw has already forgotten

the arrangement the peach remembers

Around the bite
the skin continues moving backwards
withdrawing from the edge
folding
exposing more flesh
than was taken

The fruit arriving from itself

A revelation of brightness that seemed impossible
from the outside

as though the peach had spent months
protecting a colour
from the air

At the lowest point of the wound

something begins

A slight thickening aching to become a droplet

a gathering of whatever sweetness
the fruit can no longer keep

It remains there
for 7 seconds

attached

accumulating itself

until its own weight becomes impossible to ignore
and gravity enters the scene

Then the slow descent

Not a fall

Never a fall
The droplet lowers itself
along the inside of the wrist

with such patience
every hesitation becomes visible to the bare eye

At the wrist bone it pauses

Gathers another trace of itself

Continues

        Changes shape

   Narrows

The wrist is not smooth
and the sugar has already begun dying

The skin tightens around it
so that the wrist becomes sticky
before the hand understands
it has been touched

Another bite

The peach turns
Her thumb never does
steady through every alteration

The fruit becomes difficult
to describe

Each mouthful redraws the border

New inlets

Small coves of exposed flesh

The peach accumulates coastlines

It becomes less fruit
and more record of her mouth

At the corner of her mouth
a strand of hair drifts forward
and catches in the shine of the juice

For 7 seconds
it belongs equally to her face and
the peach

She finds the strand

Place it behind her ear
and return

The kitchen remains silent

The refrigerator is bored

The sink waits below

white
and patient
and bleached

receiving nothing yet

The fruit continues changing.

One side disappears faster than the other

The borders collapse inward.

And at the centre

something dark begins
pressing toward visibility

The pit

Waiting inside the fruit

with the patience of stone

Every mouthful has merely been
the removal of concealment

It feels abrupt
and she flinches

Suddenly there is less peach than pit

The flesh clings to it

in bright remnants

The fruit that entered the kitchen
no longer exists.

What remains

is a hard centre in the sink

a faint shine at the corner of her mouth

a wrist drying slowly in the air

and the smell on her fingers

which an hour later survives
with the peculiar persistence

of a thing
that has misplaced its body.