AUTOPSY OF DESIRE

In the mirror my mother and I have the same eyes, but when I fan my lashes to prick myself with eyeliner, the lashes, they smile. Oh. Need like a seed at my center. I wish I had more than this smile made of plastic, gunmetal, the last scrap of pancake made from last scrap of powder, my father with apples crushed into batter, the apples from orchards my lover walks over, his feet pressing rinds into earth, all that pulp, all that matter. Tell me I matter, and I will lay down like the wine to be gathered. Tell me I matter, and I will walk like a wife from the mirror, oh, take my red teeth, which is to say, kiss me. In the mirror my mother and I decide upon future, and I take the scissors and cut both our hair to be sisters like we could be orchards; I am both root and flower, her hands ripped like mine will be ripping love from above like trees torn with apples. I take the whole branch. I pluck love like a pebble placed on both eyes. Mine, yours. I could give you coins if you open your mouth to take coins. Tongue on tongue on rib. Open my mouth and fit the rib in. Tie ribbons in the holes in this torso. Tie branches too. Tell me I matter, and I will lie down like a river for your orchard to feed on. Red as the ribbon of lip on my lip. Tell me I matter, and I will lie like a lover will lie like a mother will lie like a hand on a hand on a fist on forever, if forever is just the seed at the center to be cut.

THE MARE

I’m back here, in the slow.

Grief howls in like an animal,
then stills. Huffing. Uncertain

of forms and environs. Time becomes impassable
until lover comes and holds me,

just my thumb,
so tightly,

to prove that life still
loves me, and will leave me

be if that’s what’s needed
for me to come home.

Come home. Out of the slow,

to river. To hooves cut into wood floor.
A horse stands in the room with me.

She’s grey and she’s tired.
She just wants to walk home.

Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her work appears in The Shore, Rust & Moth, The Women's Issue anthology from The Harvard Advocate, and elsewhere. She is an editor and co-founder at M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird.