THE FIGS ARE MOLDING

I learn independence through the cost of fruit / a walk in blazing sun / plastic bags full, weighing into the veins of my fingers. This, the first summer away from home. Can you spend 14 years in one place & not leave parts of yourself behind? At the end of my hungering year I broke my fast with figs / olive loaf fresh from farmers market / creme fraiche melting on tongues / legs crossed against kitchen tile, knees brushing knees; what will I sacrifice to remember this? Here, I makeup for all that I have denied myself. There is no balm for restriction greater than a sugar lying quickly to a better judgment. I pretend there is something ancestral in this. Umang says Abundance is raspberries, figs, bed sheets, poetry. Excess is watching them rot. I imagine the figtrees along stone staircases my mother used to scale. I imagine a mediterranean sun sweltering leaves that adorn soft bodies. I imagine a world in which I have no hungering year, a world that does not make me wish to have one. Mama says everything is changing too fast; for weeks we hunger for nothing but shawarma made by someone else. A home disappears around us & I wonder what will happen to the lemon tree by the window. Solmaz Sharif writes A life is a thing you have to start. I hear her / yet I wait, noticing skin in places I wouldn’t have allowed before. Sometimes the hungering year returns, as long as a second / a yearning / a spiral / against a public sidewalk / the molding of figs in my palm / among the grass of my parents’ yard. Can you spend 14 years in one place & not leave parts of yourself behind? Yes. You must not have come with anything to begin with.