Loralee Clark: Essence

Essence

She is the fruit and its pored flesh.
This I notice first, learn myself through mother:
her blood and beat, the shape of nail beds and breast.
I am the navel of this orange, separate
and the same: belly-button of source, pocked
attachment. Identical skin and nose,
lift of voice, the way my hips and belly will bulge.

​As if hovering above the white Formica, I see this fruit:
piercing my thumbnail into the rind, the oil staining
my fingers yellow. She wishes to never strip rind away,
worships only totality and the feted softness attained
from time spent sitting. Her fingers slide across the skin,
over my head and rump, over my soft, private parts.

​We rot from the inside, she
intent on absorbing the sweet pulp of me;
pockets of juice that lay beyond her bitter, white membranes.
Beyond the strings connected to our sunset skin
lay my articulation, innate tenderness and depth like
a pocket of yeast: animation, inhalation, spirit and birth
found nowhere in her pulpy fruit.

​Cut an apple cross-wise and you will see the hidden
pentagram. Cut an orange the same and see my sectioned
heart, she the thin skin separating the pulp.

​With yellowed nail, I rend: deeper punctures,
slow tearing. I work through to the navel of myself
with its long cord of white from her center, stretch unstable and awkward.

​I am smaller than I imagined,
big enough to ripen and harvest.

Loralee Clark lives in Williamsburg, Virginia and her publication credentials include poetry in the upcoming The Archivist: An Anthology for Creative Journaling Artists in The Pagan's Muse: Words of Ritual, Invocation, and Inspiration, Ed. Jane Raeburn, as well as in the poetry journals Studio One, Cannon’s Mouth, Big Windows Review, Broadkill Review, Literary Mama, The Binnacle,  Penwood Review, and Cape Rock.