Mulberries

This love is waking slow
as January ice melts, temples touching,
skin soft as a hushed prayer
of repentance under a twisted olive tree.
It is the mulberry bush we gorged on
as children, our canyon chins dribbling
with indigo lust, the sweetness in our bellies
not yet flipping our stomachs ill.
Shame is learned, Eve whispered to me;
to anyone who has feasted so relentlessly –
it lodges under fingernails like dirt, a shitty
alchemist transforming gold to lead. But
this love is a finger licked clean as bone,
pressed to knotted lips, sealed like an envelope.
It is a seed transported by a starling,
scattered in a cornfield, waiting to grow
under a shut-eye moon where light shudders
to go. This love is a woman who stumbles
with the elegance of a poem, such that my feet,
trained to tiptoe through houses of worship,
would follow her foxtrot to the gallows.
It is the window we boarded with every raised
stake, it is the greasy film of stagnation atop
an unmoving lake, it is two humans
mouth-to-mouth as this love suffocates.

By Jaimie Lee

Biography:

Jaimie Lee is a writer and psychology student from Sydney, Australia. If she could, she would spend all her time writing in sunlit kitchens surrounded by black cats.