Lemon Tree
A lemon tree grows under water. To someone swimming, snorkeling, or peering from the deck of a boat it looks insubstantial, cobwebby. Seawater bleaches the lemons of color; from above, the tree could be a different source of pearls.
Divers drop down to recover a fortune, surface with a basket of citrus fruit. Magnetic, sunlight yellow as it breaks the surface, hotter than gluttony. Lemon is a lemon is a tree is a coal stove.
The tree branches outward into submarine eruption yellow as sulfur. All around it the sea boils with acid. Lemon is a lemon is a depth charge is a frenzied motherlode.
The World of Catacombs
Because the undersea judgment becomes too much at that modulation of pressure. Time doesn’t exist any more than the vertical franchise on which we build upward from the earth.
Up is upward in only one direction. Sideways molt or breakage point facing down. The universe is a subway of direction finding. The train to the catacombs clatters like a rooster into sunlight before plunging into the intestinal wall of those a century dead. A century in which they shrank out of their best clothes into a loneliness of teeth, of death’s-head exposure.
Where into the world of catacombs does the sea enter? Murmuring or crashing on the other side of a stone wall. How long can limestone hold the sea back from a dead commune?
What will change if the wall is breached? A revolting float of corpses like hurricane victims into a live city.
A Plastic Horse
The little plastic horse fell down the bathtub drain into a volcano. He found himself in a forest where jewels grew everywhere. Sapphires and rubies hung in clusters from silky branches, and emeralds lay greener than moss underfoot. The little horse grazed the forest, grew large and dark, changed into a real horse with a confused memory of being plastic in a child’s slippery fingers. His eyes glowed amethyst.
She remembers herself about to cry as her tiny horse ran off down the drain. Her mother improvising stories in which the horse discovered fabulous adventures in the magic forest and lived happily ever after. Now she remembers being the horse, grazing on emeralds gentle as a forest floor.
Anne-Adele Wight is the author of An Internet of Containment, The Age of Greenhouses, Opera House Arterial, and Sidestep Catapult, all from BlazeVOX. She has curated several performance series in Philadelphia, including the multi-genre series Jubilant Thicket. Her work has been published internationally in print and online and includes appearances in Poets and Writers, The Adroit Journal, Luna Luna, Apiary, Bedfellows, and others.