Soft Pink Apple Covered In Bees Poem by Diane Seuss

Fingernail against zipper.
Apple covered in bees.
It's none of my business unless I'm the apple.
As a matter of fact I am
the apple. I'm soft,
I smell like apples. I sometimes
smell like apples, dream of bees.

Today I met a man
wearing a bright white undershirt. His gold
tooth gleamed. I touched
his smooth muscle. It was like lifting a chess piece
and deciding where to lay it
down. Nearby the brown eggs waited
to be chosen and broken.
The fences between everything and everything
else crumbled as if struck by incredibly powerful
lightning. I've waited to be chosen and broken.
Behind him, bottles of milk stood like Ionic
columns in the Erectheum, or bridesmaids
in long cold dresses.

Lately I walk among ghosts.
Even at the store. Buoyed up
by the spirit world.
I had a choice to crush or spare
a gnat crawling on this piece
of paper. I put out my finger
and it crawled into the grooves
like a miserable man hoists
himself onto a life raft or out
of a rotten marriage. I didn't
feel like a good person, what is
a good person, somebody
tell me. I felt almost queasy
with intimate connection.
I felt my father there, my dead
lovers and friends. Not buoying
me I guess. I wouldn't even call it
love. They have sort of a hands-off
policy. I'm saying I have witnesses,
even though I live alone. When
I eat fruit they savor my savoring.

There's music that goes along with this scenario,
but I can't name it. It isn't pretty. The guitar's so raw it makes me
physically sick. My sternum's missing. Heart's unprotected.

Hissing wind. Salty rain.

Rain before the hurricane
tastes like salt, but you have to taste it
to know it, you have to let it touch you
and then you must bring it to your lips.
To know it you swallow it.

Oh I could call you darling, I could call you
baby. I could hack my way out of a drowned
house to get back to you.

Or I could stand here, briny water rising
over my nipples. Eve stood there.
She held an apple in her hand,
her palm extended like a pleasure boat.