Rare Orchid

I had to stop my broom and write
when I received your message.
Once you glazed me with light
like a baker with pastry brush and butter.
I've been eating alot of rich things lately
but the artery that runs between our hearts
remains smooth, like a canal
like the hall of butterflies in Toltec
and I get a fever from the journey.
The doctor calls this a "luxury symptom"
but its better than
"the heart having no place to reside"
or stepping on a snake shed
placed deliberately on the threshold
by some jealous no-gooder.
You are like that rare orchid, the salep,
whose root is shaped like a hand
and is oh so lucky.
A person can dust their deck with it
and get a card spread that's almost too hot to handle.
I blow it over my desk
before I write this but can only
fold into an origami camera.
There are photocopies of your hands up on the wall
placed about temple high
for when I do this broom dance.
Also some butcher paper on the floor,
but no outline of a body,
just an imaginary fly circling around my head.
The first apples fell last night in the wind,
the hardest and greenest under Mars.
Later, time to dunk for the sweeter
and that is lucky too,
the food of the unseen ones.
And now also the pine trees are running with sap
in their fig shaped openings.
I smear a drop on my forehead
thinking if I ever got close again
I'd make you stick to me there.
But for now it just looks like a honey crusted tear
coming out of the blue.

^

Biography

Amy Trussell's work has been published in a number of journals including The Prague Revue, The New Orleans Review, The Beltane Papers, and Square Lake. She also performs dance with poetry in the San
Francisco Bay Area and New Orleans. She can be contacted at theloom@earthlink.net