Carve pomegranates full of chandelier pieces with rusted scissors
she pulled out of her apron pocket so juice bleeds into the cutting board. Separate the arils with hot water. Red splatters up her arms forming bracelets of droplets, bands of nectar as beautiful as jewelry. Her hands fill with cuts as she peels, the glass leaving triangle imprints along the lines of her palms. Her buried house is covered in Corona de Cristo and cannonballs by Spanish conquistadors. She stopped dreaming seven months ago and the silence fears the outside so she peels pomegranates grown through the window carved by worms. Corona de Cristo blooming backwards, becoming seeds, as they drip onto the tree, lethal sap mixing with its juice, turning fruit into glass, which she crushes into sand with wisdom teeth, trying to hear the dust. She’s hung a cannonball as a lamp above her cutting board, not threatened by its weight hung by flower crowns, Corona de Cristo intertwined, a crown of thorns. She picks off a thorn everyday to add to the flower vase on her mantel, trying to make it beautiful. The flowers martyred the moss on her roof before she could stop them, so she planted some on her ceiling, letting it hang down, running her fingers through it to fall asleep. Her bed is too high to reach, she pulled her chair next to it to climb atop. Its intricate backrest is falling apart as she holds it every night. So is the moss, crumbling in her fingers. She broke the angel above her mantelpiece into an arm and a leg and a body, yet even the stickiness of her pomegranates couldn’t put them back together. She prays and prays and agrees to give the angel everything, her decisions and arrogance and fingernails, but the house keeps getting smaller, trampled by cannonballs. |