ghazal for sunday afternoons

if you want to live forever, every seven days there will be a garden that you cut:

weekly tsunami of dimpled strawberries, fleshy tomatoes, bush-broccoli to cut.

i love you, blood, crying for the caress of knives like a baby bird, & i love you, mouth,

hot & possessive as children’s sunburned digits carving into plum pits, so i do cut.

my body writhes like a mass of greens, collared & fried, flanked by butter blades. it is formless, 

the child of seventeen generations, heaves on a paper plate of women who cut.

i pinch an unripened green bean off its vine every time i breathe. in every movement of

my back, straightening like a psalm, i conquer a city. i leave a few whole, a few cut.

my mind tangles. i am winter peaches, skins balled up into crushed velvet & shoved inside

the dripping center. i chase the cart, barreling miles ahead. catch, throw. live, die. glue, cut.

if you want to live forever, you should move more slowly: lemon zest here & bell pepper

skin there. but i can’t allow it. i am too restless, collapsed around my seedcore. too cut.