store-bought cut fruits
I chew enough to taste the metaphors for love
different kinds
inside the breath of every poems
how it recurred in different handwritings
only if the family were unfortunate
giving birth to a melancholic
and the way my mother loved me
she gave just enough
for me to feel the different kind
one through store-bought cut fruits
the warmth it should exuded when the airy flesh met my teeth
was it the same with what people had?
the cold grip my nervous system can digest
was it the same like the one I read on a poet’s e-zine?
what else was there to feel?
not calm but enough, I suppose
the soft elegy in mother’s hums when she cut me fruits
but mother never cut me fruits
father would quietly nod and be sympathetic
of my loneliness
and mother would be a woman in her 40s
who insisted she did
one of us believe, in our culture
bodies who were once connected
through umbilical cord should never argue
she was not wrong
mother never cut me fruits
but she let me eat her store-bought cut fruits
