Back to Issue 8

Orange Like That by Shannon Joyce Prince

At the first eighth of the orange we are back in
Mexico and for a moment it's peaceful, the fields
look like a verdant sea and she can pretend her life
is not vendable, her health and her hands have no
price attached.   I, unborn, am watching her as she
hands the orange to me and I pry seeds from the
messy flesh that stings my papercuts.   This is
before they spray the DDT.
At the second eighth we are reminded about the
colors of a huipil, her sister in Guatemala who
breathed poison so others could eat bananas,
Josefina, Ofelia, Heriberto, the names of children
poison will never allow her to conceive.  
The third eighth she rips from the fruit reminds her
of live-in days in San Diego, (the lovely zoo where
she took her three young charges).   Back home, she
wasn't allowed to eat la jefa's fruit, its too
expensive she said, even for the woman who loved her
children by proxy, but never as much as she would
come to love me.
At the fourth eighth we veer towards father whom she
met at Mass in a horrid orange suit, (but oh,
weren't those the times, and he remains so
beautiful.)   He made her fearful not as men are
rumored to do but because she feared for his heart,
so soft it could be pulled apart at any dueno's whim
like the tenuous eights of an orange.
Now my father can speak, we are at the fifth eighth
and how his heart survived its sale under overpasses
and in the backs of trucks on the way to pick the
orchards of the people who persecuted him for being
illegal.   Though he believed La Virgin would appear
next to him one day in the boughs to give him a
blessing, she didn't, yet she sent her daughter, my
mother.
The sixth eighth makes us silent, we have said
nearly everything we can bear to say about the
metronome of chores, and we do not wish to speak
about the cancer that spreads through her body like
a spring of orange blossoms.   All the beauty in her
life, save me and Papi has been for someone else,
her nightmares ensured the viability of other
peoples dreams.
On the seventh eighth I think how I will not let
them put roses on her grave, roses grown in Ecuador
by women so full of pesticide their limbless
children fall prematurely from their wombs and no
one can afford flowers for the graves.
Now the ignominious "eighth," bulging freakishly
from the sphere, pesticide born ninth eighth,
strange like how Mayan women don't know how to not
wear bright colors, even when being sacrificed,
strange like El Negro, el padre, from Georgia who
says his people used to sing in the cotton fields
because black people didn't know how to quiet their
song.   Strange like how Mayans, Blacks don't know
how to give up even when being given up, he says,
they harbor freakish hope among horror.
I eat the last eighth, the sun flesh salty with
tears.

Genies by Shannon Joyce Prince

The first thing you must let go of are the gold
urns, jade inkwells, carnelian canisters of snuff
where we are supposed to be.  

Most beings are not discreet,
they really want to be found.

And the next thing you must know
is that we are the colors of the sky - cyan green
thunder over the sea,
solar gold and lilac aurora,
celestial ethereal silver blue.

I suppose the other thing to learn
is that
when we come to earth it isn't to hide
ourselves in objects so ancient their status as
treasure or trash is ambiguous.
My last reserve was the torn body of a fawn.
Before that a one-winged butterfly tattered as an
ancient flag.
I love for hands to descend upon me, tender and
healing...

But those who find me are always so awestruck at the
grace
with which I pull wealth or peace or flowers from
the air,
so astounded by the things I know, math-like
abstract wonder.
Loving is not an option to be considered.
People are too astounded for tenderness.

Do you know what I wish?
To be simple, clear.
I'd rather be comprehended than mythical.