Wings & Tangerines
But don’t onion peels kind of look like Angel wings,
although you sweep their see-through blessings into the trash?
Doesn’t your blood look like a renaissance masterpiece on this tarmac?
Something believers would stand in line to sip?
Your waking seconds to your oblivion, a collage on the eyelids of some false god,
who lost the lottery and made you in the broom closet
with a waitress who has the same
dream each night of running down an
open road without her kneecaps.
No kneecaps nothing to give away your shaking.
No kneecaps nowhere for one blow to bring you down.
No kneecaps no way to fall to your knees.
This is the sun refusing to surrender,
which always inspires us before it blinds us
but who could protest such a golden, brave violence?
Doesn’t the tangerine, a mini sun itself, look like a good catch all peeled and
undone in your palm?
A lover porous and yielding, still juicing despite inevitable bitterness.
Sloppy kisses and vitamin C do keep
the body moving.
If this is all you need, that is good,
that is best.
If not, close your eyes and keep
reaching I guess.
Angelica Whitehorne is a Buffalo, New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, Hooligan Magazine, Cypress Journal, Oyster River Pages, among others.