Fruit like green oranges,
Small leaf-shedding thorny tree,
And sticky wood pulp.
No one eats Osage.
No one tastes these hedge apples.
The thorns make barbed wire.
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.
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