We leave, we come back, we talk about leaving again

She was sleeping with an older man when her father had his first heart attack. She felt much differently about sickness those days. She asked her lover for fruit, he returned with cherries. The shape and pit were too much for her. She left the blue bowl quiet at the end of the bed and starting pushing the pillows around on the other side. When she got up her tee-shirt had twisted, two long legs, a fragile insect, something flexible, was tucked in the tight wind of fabric on her hip. After ten minutes of consulting the ceiling she knew she had to pee and she would have to call her mother again, as wrong as it felt to do so.
She peed and inadvertently pulled the cherry stem from her shirt, let it fall into the pool of piss and clean water below her legs. While flushing she noticed it and found it funny that the fruit would leave her this way.
The cherry legs floated along, along the dark intestines of the city, catching on mold conglomerations, pulling free with a hunk of pampers. They moved well in the stream, up and down, delicately stepping. They looked like tweezers. The shit build up and wax of the stems gave them a metallic sheen. Perhaps they were prepared for such a journey, drank their pesticides with a more empty belly.
At a certain point in their travels the stems were filtered and trashed. In large barrels of waste so soft it was happy to denigrate into the ground the stems were moved outside of the city to a dump. The trash was evenly spread, the stems were thankfully able to sun themselves on the ground, hardening their outsides.
For six weeks the legs stared at the sun and tried to be grateful for everything that had gone on. Everyone's life must take a path, make a course. They knew it would end here and it would have to be ok.
Missy had worked at the dump for almost an entire decade and didn't enjoy it, for many obvious reasons. The amount of waste made her feel terrible, she hated being faced with so much destruction every day. She was eating so much. She was only thirty four and was twice the size she was at 28. Missy walked the brown terrain each day, drove a little truck in and out of the piles. She spread air-conditioning chemicals, she read romance novels, she looked at the bizarre combinations of trash, the most ironic comparisons of worthy and worthless. Some of what she did didn't matter but Missy found certain points important, like noting the decay process of 700 rolls of unused toilet paper or old bed sheets.
Missy wore coveralls, boots. Sometimes she crouched on the mounds, examined the face of a watch, the curl of a molding veggie. Her new shape fit the coveralls, fit someone's idea of a huge toddler when she crouched. She was stomach and knees and totally unaware of herself.
At once two cherry legs found themselves attached to soft denim that was beginning to fray. It was the spot next to her knee, the bit that protruded when folded. Tucked carefully into the skin of her uniform the legs moved on, beyond the dump.
Missy takes her coveralls off in the locker as is protocol. She says she does, anyway. She hates the soap they provide in the locker room and the lights bother her, the mirrors. She just has one for her face at home and she still enjoys her face.
Missy takes a shower while sitting in the tub once home, some more childish crouch, some adorable masturbating behind a thick green shower curtain. She mostly imagines the sun, being nude in a restaurant, eating all the trash, taking everything in for real now.
When finished she emerges into her room, slips on a robe, heats up more food, watches something on television. Her trailer rocks softly in the wind. She listens to the movements of her neighbors, their naughty children, their tight drug habits. She wants the trailer in the back to blow to prove to everyone that it can and will happen.
Soon she cleans, she hangs the towels, washes the dishes, eats more cold meat from the fridge, wipes down the counter and sink, hangs her work attire on a hook because she doesn't wash them every night. Who would?
The stems loose all their grip and at once fall to a brown carpet floor. Dark as the fibers are the stems are safe, now a lightish brown themselves from the bleaching sun. Missy steps down hard in the direction of the stems. She stubs her toe and runs the pointed tips where the cherries once were deep into her arch. It's amazing how heavily the stems were able to insert themselves in Missy. All those chemicals, all that time drying and being covered in chemicals again. These stems were full of something completely unoriginal to themselves.
Missy cursed and laughed, being tough for no one. She sat down and looked at the little spots of blood, long brown tails. She had to pull them and did and it hurt more then stepping on them had.
Missy went to bed, after a Dove bar from the freezer. She laid down. She let the blood dry and felt something coming up through her neck. Sometimes she was anxious. Someone at work gave her some literature on the anxieties of working where she did, but it wasn't anxiousness. She lifted her throat to cool but it was moving back, over the hump of bone on her chin, her square forehead, pooling under each follicle of hair. Her stomach was separate, could have been on the floor. Her hips hovered below her. She didn't think about anything but feeling the different feelings coming from her body, stemming from her foot.
Missy died that night from the puncture wounds from contaminated trash. She was pronounced dead with a cute little smirk on her face in a big florescent room where people could see her entire naked body. She was fat, they thought.
The stems finally fell apart. They weren't able to agree with one another, they didn't make sense. The little bits broke further and further apart, spreading around into water, air, still as mixed up as ever.

split moon months

we made one moon on our back,
different pieces, slices of half-moon months.
then full bridal moons for parties,
different shades for cops.
the street people hang on them
and water their eyes,
milky-moon iris.
oh please, the older man said,
smoke the moon like dope,
hold the darling candle closer,
and he light his whole head in soft flame.
no moon of mine, the other heap responded,
comes close to my mouth,
way low to my toes and opens like a table,
a smart coffin for bats and evil practices.
it's mostly a game, the heap admitted,
something i play to feel closer to
my old man moon,
my push-apart dad.
a tall girl who deserves it, some say,
put moon in a drink,
in her dark clothes, her smooth skin.
i get them this way, she coddles her macho moon,
and they forget why they came, she says,
stay on to look for it again.
she knows they actually don't,
says it just to hear it with her own full moon mouth.