Molly's Fruit Bowl

Deft

Finicky

Supercilious

Pulchritudinous

Cassock

Dianthus

Diffident

Omnipotent

Ebullient

Jaunty

I eat words like fruit, stashing my favorite ones in little wooden bowls, brightly painted and sometimes peeling on the outside

My left hand has splinters where my palm cups and carries—

Every finger on my right is drenched with a multi-colored, sticky-sweet juice, viscous if you let me settle any one pad on your tongue

Deft—you know, so quick—tastes like bright, crisping citrus—

Oranges, if the peel crunched the way apples do

Finicky; milky, a flick of my tongue against the roof of my mouth

Spit collects where the gaps in my teeth are, catching the word, Asian pear white

Supercilious, a quiet grating of my tongue against my bottom teeth, squishes and squirts Dragonfruit and its seeds

Bitter, bright feeling; the pulse of both every black seed and the soft, pink muscles of my throat

Pulchritudinous takes longer, sloshes around with rotten-apple-indicision

The pointed crackling has lost its touch—

My thumb, pressed to my lips, comes back oozing, squish, grey-green

Cassock, on its tail-end (taken from the bowl with both hands, bitten with every available tooth) curves

Watermelon used to itch on the slide down—it met the curdling yellows of my stomach and burned

Now it is only my mouth that burns (if only I had used a metal bowl; colder for longer, less of a mess)

Dianthus, yet it’s own, is nothing I’ve eaten before—and yet every up-ticking syllable is ever-more raspberry bittersweet

Bitter

Sweet

Where Diffident is bitter (my tongue stressed and hard-pressed on lime and lemon peels)

Omnipotent is sweet. As whatever definition suggests, cracks and crevices I have pulled raw and open in my cheeks sting where pomegranate juice slides between them

A devilish fruit

It tastes of all sin that allows for such awful texture

Ebullient is salty—a cool and biting unripe mango taste I can spit out if I want to

Yellow is not my favorite color but it seems to show up wherever I am—in this case, as a string of spit connecting my full mouth to the hot underside of a wooden fruit bowl I left in the sun

Jaunty, well

I could describe a grape to you, but we both know it

If purple had a flavor, wouldn’t this be the fruit to suggest?

Cold and firm, rolled around in a soup, and swallowed

Harlequin juices at the bottom of the bowl mixed brown

I’ve half a mind to go the grocery store

Or the bookstore

To preserve the taste, I guess I’ll need more fruits

And more words

And, of course, a more durable bowl