The Night Orchard
As we step into the street,
I can’t remember if I left
my wallet in my other bag.
Night swarms around us
like wasps. You say the stars
look nice, but I know the night
like Coriolanus knew Aufidius.
You say all great adversaries
are secretly super into each other,
and I know you’ve said that before.
But when the night comes for me,
I forget my clothes. Under
the moon, I watch the world
burst apart like the seam in a dress
that I forgot had a zipper. A dress
that now lies in the streets of Antium.
You ask a question that involves
the word “again,” or maybe it’s
again that you ask. I can’t hear
over your loud voice,
waves of sound so bright
they sting like shards
of metal in my palms.
I wonder if I’ve put the right
clothes over the right bones.
As my fingertips blacken
like the fern in my home that
I can’t care for, I answer that
it’s a kind of Object Unimpermanence.
When the apple goes behind your back,
we have to start all over again.
I can’t remember, at the party,
if the table’s edge is close behind me.
I put my hand behind my back
to feel for the table or an apple -
I still don’t know the trick works.
My glass falls, and out pours smoke,
dust, and all the trust I had that
by next year’s birthday,
we’d be at that motel in Antium.
And more pours out: It tastes like
apples; your hand in my mouth;
and something I can’t remember.
I tell you night poisons the punch.
And as the apple snakes behind your back,
I know I’ll have to start all over again.
Someone’s mother has a napkin.
She says I had a different haircut
before. I squirm in my dress – it’s
the dry skin of a dead girl that
no one remembers but me.
Different hair, tight skin -
my bones crack under her knotted waist.
The apple snakes behind my back,
and someone’s mother has faith
that it will still be there tomorrow.
I have faith too, in a God
of our own creation.
In every nerve, a catapult,
a driving force of life and light,
of getting that job at Costco,
and kissing your children.
I believe in the God of pain.
He forms a map of walls
In the skin of each potential life.
It hugs us tight under a dome so big,
we duck our heads so the
car won’t hit the garage ceiling.
So big, yet I scrape my knees
each day in avoidance of
a God who bears my name.
God takes the apple
from my hands,
the apple snakes
behind his back,
the snake slithers wildly
up the walls of the dome.
And somewhere in the night,
the paper bottom of a soda cup,
left too long on a dresser,
finally gives up the ghost.
Sarah Pritchett is a PhD candidate in Philosophy, Human Rights at Lund University in Sweden. Originally from Texas, Pritchett moved to Sweden in 2015 and has studied a bachelor’s in human rights, a master’s in criminology with a focus on political violence, and a secondary master’s in human rights with a focus on migrant justice. Pritchett has had a lifelong love of poetry and the Arts and is currently working on developing a collection of short poems.