Osage Orange

We nod into gentleness like genocide sleep in flourishing sanity through elms sifting epitaphs. Our sheen of silence on white muslin offers up old uncles like hedge apples useless seeds of grieving trees. I cannot remember my father ever saying he loved me. There is no time for monologues, soft slurs of alabaster days burnished on a tusk of sky. Tenderly, the testicular moon rises in night, iridescent, opulent, laid open like a wound.