Nailah

17

Avocado Days

Avocado Days revolve around the kitchen table
that stands on three wobbly legs supported by
department store catalogues and envelopes from the IRS

We are comfortably unhappy, swiping laden knives over whole grain bread
I forgo the avocado because when I was little I decided
it’d be the only green thing I’d never eat
My bread is heavy with strawberry slices and honey, lips
thick with sweetness

We three and our voices rise and fall and rise
like the belly of the cat sleeping beneath the table
who swipes a sandpaper tongue against my ankle and lays in wait for scraps

(Aggressively vegan friends are fun to live with
until they hate on you for that leather jacket your mom got you when you were fourteen
But your hair has never been smoother, skin never clearer
so you hide the tub of strawberry lemonade froyo in the back of the freezer
and watch them while they make homemade lotion in the kitchen sink)

When we first came here, the spout spat rust and
we played ‘Blackberry, Blackberry’, chased each other’s mouths
shotgunning fruit and smoke and sugar
There was a record player that worked and a radio that worked and a dishwasher that didn’t
We drowned in incense smoke and the smell of sweat, strung up
a curtain of beads because we couldn’t afford to replace the hinges so we just
took down the door

(If you need a smoke, the fire escape takes you straight to the roof
where Ursa Major whispers the yolk of a velvet fruit and a pebblestone girl
and we watch the great page turn)

Jenny, I think we’re all happier as hippies.

Somehow here I’ve become something I’m not when I’m at home
Here I am a boy called Noah and my name doesn’t mean the same thing anymore
and writing is always a prelude to aching wrists and not frustration
Here falling asleep means a patch of sunlight and a pair of eyes between brown and green, pulse hammering behind your ear, and wondering if this is really what you want

I don’t know that I know what I want
or that I could totally pull a Genesis and send a great deluge through the valleys of my life and start all over again with a couple of cool kids in a new place that’s green
I don’t know that I know I have the universe in my hands or maybe I’m afraid to say it out loud

Maybe I’m afraid those eyes and that patch of sunlight aren’t willing to be my friends until October comes and I find the guts to say anything

But there is a girl here who scribbles on my skin, cups my cheeks in her alabaster hands, and sighs spring into my balmy winters until eventually I am the summer night she knows – I want to thank her for not letting me forget

And here I can kiss Kafka on the cheek and forage for Stanislavski’s fingernails between the fine China
sing Assata Shakur and Huey P. Newton to sleep and throw glitter in the dryer just to see how the clothes come out
or eat sliced pears with the cat that sleeps underneath the table
figure out that nothing really needs figuring out
and become best friends with Not Knowing
tuck myself into bed at night and love the way I kiss my own cheek before I go to sleep

Jenny, I think I might’ve grown up
and I think you oughta come over sometime
maybe on an Avocado Day
I’ll walk you down to the market with our arms laced together
you in your dresses and me in my dark skin

A street vendor sells avocadoes for three cents a pop
and boxes of strawberries ten cents each.