Forbidden Fruit (poem)

Forbidden Fruit

Reincarnate from a molting-pod, as you were a jacket

folding into its own hood, a chrysalis

peeling an old pied skin then ratchet

ratchet like a whalebone corset

Worked up from the foot, past the hips

Hung by the nervy grip of the brainstem

Here you have crown and root

Ladder to a swaying over-weighted limb

Tantalus’s pomegranate, Eve’s forbidden fruit

You might expect this she-disease

Of finding proofs

a chronic ear cocked to a shaman’s woofs

writ on water had annoyed her

you can get it, under skin and breath

contending on a turkey bone

to wish the owner of the fingers

death

to wish the quicksand yielding faces

blanched and stretched

grows concrete and erodes a bridge

from one millennium to the next

a literal committee staffed in chairs

fat rears and single-task-trained intellects

Forbidden Fruit

King’s Bishop

(2021, Stephanie Foster)