Upon my mother sanitize my fruit

Soon is ghost-shaped.
She watches my mother knife
crisis tomatoes each by each
to boiling pot. Here is a fruit
growing backwards, born
with a mouthful of basilteeth.
Here is a life made of hangnails;
moles, ungroomed in patches;
here is a body, learning
to feel the cold. The foot
of the whole of the hill I will
never visit. The me
my mother intimates
slick like olive; cream like wheat.
My mouth a well-
trod wound.
And my body, a shadow
instructing my feet: the weight
of yet, the wait of all-ready,
the squawk
of a clot of a fruitfilling
red, unafraid
of living –

*The last lines of this poem are borrowed from the song “Liquid Smooth” by Mitski. She sings “my blood is red and unafraid of living.”

Sarah Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and transgender-about-town, and serves as Managing Editor at Stone of Madness Press. Author of two chapbooks, A HOLE WALKED IN (Sword & Kettle Press) and THE DREAM JOURNALS (giallo lit), they have also had work in Electric Literature, The Offing, Bitch Magazine, and elsewhere. Cavar navel-gazes at cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah