After School

The trickster goddess prepares a snack and demands that I write my life in apple cores. She grins with bits of peel wedged between each tooth. There is a star in the middle of every apple, even the ones with worms, she tells me. I ask her if the worms gestate in nebulae just like stars, if they are conceived in the collision of gases, if gravity collapses out of exhaustion and stars are simply what happens when a mother cannot cut another apple for her children. The goddess lays her paring knife on the counter next to three seeds that scattered in the slicing, and laughs. What the fuck do I know? She twirls a stem between her fingers until it breaks. Your true love’s name starts with the letter ‘K’. Who’s going to tell your spouse? I pick up the plates, nibble the sweet flesh of her cheek as I pass. She disappears between my lips. Later, my spouse will wonder why my kisses taste like apples.

Jessica Coles (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Capsule Stories, Full Mood Mag, EcoTheo Review, Stone Circle Review, League of Canadian Poets - Fresh Voices/Poetry Pause, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate, is available through Prairie Vixen Press. Twitter: @milkcratejess