Eating a Blackberry in Noon Sunlight…

Eating a Blackberry in Noon Sunlight on a Wednesday in December
Larissa Larson

Inspired by “I Watch Her Eat the Apple” by Natalie Diaz

I rotate you in my left fingertips, a tiny bushel of balloons. I think of the Goo Goo Dolls and how baby’s black balloon makes me cry. Any second you could pop, spill your neon pink insides, and go. A bottle of seeded wine I’ve become addicted to.

Drunk on your fragrant skin my right finger stumbles on body like braille, a foreign language
I yearn to learn by tongue. Hot breath I exhale to make the tiny brown hairs on your silky skin stand on end. Both knowing what’s to come.

I hold you up to the windowpane, your body a stained-glass cathedral. Royal blood bound in velvet crush praying to be dethroned. Sheer eminence shattered with just one bite. Starving for
a Byzantine feast, I split you in half like breaking an ancient empire.

I twist your bruised body, the color of a needed mistake, where the deep tissue shimmers silver with my salvia. Violet transforms into violence, and I beg your bleeding body to stain my lips. Red, the color of the dying sun.

Winter hungry sky,
gleaming with bodies of light,
prepares to perish.


Larissa Larson attends Hamline University’s MFA Creative Writing program in St. Paul, MN, and assists with Water~Stone Review and Runestone Literary Journal.

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