Lemon

At first, there was a field wide open as the plateau of

a bowl with grand green mountains for walls. The sky was

cloudless and practically eternal (practically a pond without a

ripple), the heat was serene and sweatless, the grass dry and

edging on the material of forest fire. To think of it now I get

goosebumps - how to wrap my mind around that blueness,

that mother green globe, and that screaming, pulsating yellow.

I am lying on a table and have propped my upper parts on

sturdy elbows and propped my shaking knees up on planted

feet, my toes gripping the edge, and my women are all there

- the small village of my peers - the teenage girls, their braids

and bobbles and freckled hands to hold me up, and then the

midwife: Lola, a hard-edged girl of sixteen at the very base of

the table, standing on sturdy feet, wind chimed in her white

nightie and angling her joined hands to that ever-bright and

somehow sunless sky. It was as if the sun took form in be-

tween her palms and assumed the shape of a lemon, a simply

sour porous little citrus which she lowered from its basking

place and held level with her navel. I am seventeen, naked

beneath my hospital gown, and slick in preparation of the

task before me: a sort of reverse birthing. Lola angles the fruit

at the opening of my vagina and begins pushing, breathing,

in and out, in and out, everyone all at once like we are one

big mother being with moving parts (the way that a bundle

of ferns drapes out in all directions) or one giant heart simply

pumping on the grass. The act is hefty with discomfort but

we all bear the burden as I beg my muscles to not tighten up

around the foreign object. The citrus follows the slick passage

inwards to the core of my being or the center where my en-

ergy is born and resides and when the lemon finds its resting

spot there is a gawky exhale from the creature that is us.

I woke up from this dream on a morning in late

August when my summer job had just wrapped up for the

season. I woke up in my purpled bedroom packed too tight

against my skin with its collage-scape decor of saved grocery

lists and birthday cards, stuffed animals, and used condoms

in the trashcan. My town was a place where kids got drunk

in the woods on Friday nights because it was the only thing

to do. To drive through my town in the summer: the cupped

palms of a lush, pine-treed giantess - curving with each

groove in her hand (the marriage line, the health line, the life

line like our roads cut through thick forest). Route two is the

long body of a tree and I lived on the near tip of one of its

many branches. Route two is the baby sister of the Deerfield

River, the copycat. Route two runs through my little town

- the railroad track and the potholes, the old bricked town

hall with its gray arched doorway, and buildings that have

housed a handful of businesses in the past two hundred years.

In my town, I learned to fear idle hands. Boredom was a

threat, boredom led me straight to Darren and Darren led me

straight into the woods to fuck on a picnic blanket.