eating figs
eating ***
eating flesh

i swim through my mother's veins
and peel back layers,
distinctly feminine.

i see me.
i feel me.
i taste me.

we hold delicate
yet strong and vibrant lovers
in our mouths,
inflated candy eggs—cosmic nectar.

foolishly gazing at our sordid massacres:
flesh upon flesh
seed upon fleshy seed

visions of nightquests
sing-songing liquidly

i vanish into wormholes,
fiery transformations,
and bitter leaves,
which weep through silver pores.

feverishly, we pick apart the stems,
dropping them away.
hurry, hurry!
we're so impatient to get these figs
into our mouths.

heads crane forward
and tongues ****** first.
hands follow, fingers last.
crush down once, thrice
on earth maternal—
it's not juice, it's cream.

siddhis speculatively come forward
and burn triangle patterns behind our eyelids.
she is freed again from past recollections,
elegantly fighting off disease—cellularly—while drumming solos,
gnashing figs,
and caressing twigs with toes.

i invite you to breathe me in—
soft, solid air,
stale with anticipation
but honey-lemon sweet,
and empty besides.

we pour sweet broths into banana-leaf cups
and drink beetles out of sugarcones,
traces of ectoplasm dribbling down our chins,
violetly forgetting the echoes of
peppermint vapors,
and nourishing our bellies
with heavy, pregnant plant mothers.

i long for excess,
and i can never get enough.
besides,
it is the summer of figs,
and we cry openly
at the beads of sweat
forever forming on glassy surfaces.

i taste-touch with my fingers
and feel-taste with my tongue,
and still i feel that we aren't close enough,
so i invite it to enter me and become me,
and now
i am fig.

it's as if the cilia-seeds
and tender pink spots
expect the pressure.

it's true:
we expect this solid, gravitational pressure
and they rip off wings,
just to bathe in our nectar.

she hadn't known true ecstasy
until this violation of figs,
until her madness imploded secretly
like their demure insides,
and all she could think about
was jelly pulp and pale achenes.

so saccharine, you say,
wiping your mouth with a sticky hand,
and wiping your hand on stiff denim,
but really there's even more sweet to come later.

green-plump
violet-plump
pink-pulp
swallow

i hear it before my ears do.
i see it before my eyes do.

i swimmingly tesselate
and wade through the liquid air,
particles dissolving around me.

there's some give,
and i'm able, you see,
to be here in this palace of
pent-up pleasures and lastly,
comes stillness.

she weeps hatred from her body
so it doesn't seep
into her half-digested fig:
the fig of all figs.

caked with dried mud and chocolate,
we emerge
and fall off effortlessly
into angles of light.

dust rises like a prism
along pre-choreographed
provocations of smoke—
steps cascading for spirits of anjeer
to patter down
into our realm.

feed me, they say.
and so we do.

we break open the figs
with childish fingers,
tasting before offering
on little plates carved out of spoons,
melting coconut lashes and spidermilk
in the process.

the oven creaks quietly,
and raindrops lift gauzy veils
from drowsy eyelids
on sleepy mornings.

pulling waterwords
from unification,
fiery feelings die down
until they're just a glimmer—
a glimmer of softness,
with wet embers tantalizingly
dripping fireworks,
like childhood.

waves murmur something secret,
and the whispers only take 5,000 years
before they reach your ears,
yet you still startle and awaken,
sweat on the brow,
and glisten your way through,
splashing sloppily through
paper screens
to deliver messages.

iron tea kettles sit in dying ashes for far too long.

in my visions,
i saw ripe, bursting figs
hurtling across starlit skies,
blossoming beautifully
before dropping heavily and with sound.

and suddenly it was summer—
radiant, glowing summer—
with our skin dissolving upwards
in the golden heat,
sparkling dramatically
in the decaying light.

i wanted to pull something out of me
but the strings were tied to my organs.

slippery insides meant less danger,
so we tiptoed on grains of sand
and grains of rice,
and black beads,
and black beans,
and pearls,
and magnets.

we tripped through hours,
while minutes crawled to a close,
and sifted fine blue watersilk
until it exploded with mollusks.

i am a clam
and you are a gallon of fir tree sap,
delivered every wednesday,
to embellish our
fried and crispy things.

almond-shaped plumes and
majestic, purple heliochromes
blaze saturn rings coldly,
while the fruit falls apart—
first at the center—
and our gaze lingers on mother:
she is
dancing,
and dancing.

She said over the ether: ‘I’m eating a perfectly ripe fig. So nice, I’m going to have another’.

We’ve been here before he thought as he read her text. In a memory’s moment he was back at her dining room table with five figs in a small bowl. The table wore a blue cloth, and she a Scandinavian skirt with pockets. It was that time of year when the midday light can be so golden, so wonderful. He remembered her delight that he had ‘brought figs to her table’. He was so full to the brim with love for her on that autumn day that those figs had seemed so very right, more than appropriate; a perfect addition to their developing intimacy. She had not been wooed by figs before. He wasn’t sure she understood their significance, their ****** stance.  She hadn’t read The White Goddess. When pressed to explain he was tempted to tell her exactly what he understood a fig might suggest between lovers, and lovers they certainly were. She had cried out under his touch, had opened her mouth, her beautiful eyes, had cried out like no woman he had even begun to know. She was so extraordinarily passionate as he touched her. She moved with him and their bodies would kiss and stroke as though unbidden, of their own volition, ungovernable even. So when he touched the closest fig in the blue bowl on the lunchtime table it was a little like being touched by her in the greatest intimacy. The skin of the fig has this rub, it feels like the ******* of his passion, that she had so generously touched, had stroked, had known, had brought between the valley of her dear ******* that now, these several years gone and past, he still wondered at, that such a curve and fall and sensation in the hand and fingers could remain so wondrous, so magically beautiful.

He had responded in a text by writing: you sensuous woman . . .  And she in reply had said:  ‘Just pecking’. Does one really peck at figs? Surely not, he thought. She wrote: I meant peckish! Stupid predictive text. And he said: Surely one doesn’t eat figs because one is peckish. That’s what digestive biscuits are for.

And so it went on a little, this conversation over the ether. But all the while he was back in that sunlit room quite alone with her, before he should have been alone with her and feeling such passion, such a passion that its imprint still remained on his consciousness. He wondered if she really understood about this passion of his. It was beyond any possible fig known to man or woman. They were never figgish, only once and she had said it was not for her, and he had understood, and loved her all the more for such frankness in the face of passion. He was still feeling his way, hardly knowing how to deal with such passionate closeness, such desire to be close. How he loved her, he thought this again and again, again and now. He seemed to hold a whole litany of love inside him that he longed to sing out to her.

He was so grateful that she had interrupted those afternoon labours at his desk with her teasing words, and wondered whether she really did eat that second fig.