My heart is a bright, round pomegranate
that’ll stain your fingers if cracked open.
These days, the world exists only in shades of red and orange.
Autumn’s chill sleeves my forearms in goose bumps.
The wind funnels in my ears, carrying with it
the smell of pumpkin intestine
and the taste of bittersweet chocolate.
Lately I’ve been feeling the way a moonbeam tastes,
light leaking through the cracks in my teeth:
like the spotlight that cast a yellow glow onto Joni Mitchell’s skin
at Wembley Stadium in 1974,
even though all of her songs were about being blue.
I play “A Case of You” on loop while walking to class;
it makes the sight of leaves falling off the trees
a little more bearable.
I legitimately think that the world is bleeding
because all I can think about right now are bears getting ready
for hibernation.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence:
if I haven’t raked the leaves off my lawn yet,
how am I supposed to tell the difference?
The electric color of someday
is splattered all over my bedroom walls.
I am as soft as a tsunami.
I take naps on clouds and go fishing in volcanoes.
Little Jules watches it all through telescope eyes –
and in a few years, those telescope eyes will become glasses,
and those glasses will become contact lenses
because she can’t stand the thought of having a tortoise shell-rimmed soul.
Objects in the mirror are never not oceans away.
L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.
A pomegranate serenades me with lullabies from the kitchen counter.
I pull out the cutting board
and hack a knife through its abdomen,
expecting seeds; instead,
all of the songs of yesterday and tomorrow and forever
come spilling out of its gut.