Tree Legs

I have peculiar bark on my long tree legs,
it grows in layers.

When I was eight, I was a fresh baked apple pie.
My mother never told me why, but I know
it was because of the tears.

My tree legs drank them every day,
while mother explored my cold sweats.
She picked them off my forehead with
smiling fingertips. Eager for discovery!

She poked through my warm crust, straight to my soft apples,
spoiling my fruit,
rotting them with her murky breath.
I was an apple pie

until the world never died.
I realized, at that precise moment,
that I was a foul smell;
putrid. I had dried up and crumbled.

There was nothing left for me but
these long, strong tree legs….

and bark.

Statue

I am laying in wet cement, gray
mud
blanket gobbling up my plague.
It is thick like me,
like the twenty years of
plaster inside.

Everything is hardening.
Kidney.
Liver.
Fallopian Tubes.
Guts.
Heart.

I have been treated like a statue.
It isn’t hard to
be still,
motionless. Erect.
Allowing curious wanderers to
make up my background,
my story.

A man brought oranges
to paint
me with. He was a soft liquid.
I was set to stone.
He sliced his moist fruit,
dripping
sweet citrus over my rough skin, melting
my rind.

Away, away I went with delicate fruit.
A new sculpture.
A beautiful, fluid seed.