SUZANNE HIGHLAND
Image by Leah Sophia Dworkin
Sometimes an Orange Tree
My best friend once told me that in order for my body to have been born women for years
bore bodies without even a hospital and that was his argument for sticking with it
Not to be thrown out with the bathwater
Not to be sent downstream in a basket
When I walk the bridge I look down on the snow and ice and picture bodies falling and then
making angels with their arms and legs
In the middle of the bridge there’s a statue of a stooped over young man and an older man
pinching his cheek
There are signs: Is it nice to be walking on a bridge? Have you eaten anything today?
Living inside my body is like living inside an eyelid glued shut
Even now the air around me is close and ribbed with veins
My ears are full of cotton humming making it hard to hear
My mouth is full of sand ticking making it hard to speak
If I concentrate hard enough I can see past detritus and into a black future
In the cities the rich buy apartments in tall buildings and then don’t live in them
There are glass rooms full of white furniture and blank air towering over the masses
navigating the streets
In the country there’s a lack of oxygenating trees
The eyelid closes tighter as if trying to protect me
I feel a wishing well inside my body shrink into a tight well of knots
Begging is unseemly considering the collection of star dust that comprises me, flung from
the far universe in colors that burst from a black past
I picture an eye opening up and letting in all the light like a slow exposure camera or a torn
piece of lace
The black future whitens and whitens until it feels like a dream
Then my stomach growls I’m hungry
In my body there’s a settlement and that settlement is made up of the wishing well a hospital
where women have their babies a great many bars and sometimes an orange tree
The orange tree is best in winter when fruit orbits the trunk
Then little animals come and then little bugs
Even now I’m trying to control the outcome
My nose needs to be smoother I think so I pull on it creating gullies of oil letting blackheads
clear the surface disengaging flakes of skin
My hair needs to be smoother I think so I pull on it until it starts falling out in the shower in
the morning
This is what happens to a body in the finite economy
I don’t want to stick with it I want to expand and expand until I become nothing
As I walk from one end of the bridge to the other the signs become increasingly more
insistent
Isn’t it nice to be walking on a bridge?
Why don’t you go eat something?
Upon suggestion I take a breath and my stardust rattles in its glass jar and some spills out
and I start to wheeze and it becomes a thin dust on the railing in front of me
There are photographs of children taped here, on this bridge that rises now in a golden light
I will miss the capybara and the elephant
I will miss the tulip and the changing leaves
And even though I have the right equipment I’ve decided to miss the experience of
pregnancy
I will not give this world my baby
I will not give up my baby so easily
bore bodies without even a hospital and that was his argument for sticking with it
Not to be thrown out with the bathwater
Not to be sent downstream in a basket
When I walk the bridge I look down on the snow and ice and picture bodies falling and then
making angels with their arms and legs
In the middle of the bridge there’s a statue of a stooped over young man and an older man
pinching his cheek
There are signs: Is it nice to be walking on a bridge? Have you eaten anything today?
Living inside my body is like living inside an eyelid glued shut
Even now the air around me is close and ribbed with veins
My ears are full of cotton humming making it hard to hear
My mouth is full of sand ticking making it hard to speak
If I concentrate hard enough I can see past detritus and into a black future
In the cities the rich buy apartments in tall buildings and then don’t live in them
There are glass rooms full of white furniture and blank air towering over the masses
navigating the streets
In the country there’s a lack of oxygenating trees
The eyelid closes tighter as if trying to protect me
I feel a wishing well inside my body shrink into a tight well of knots
Begging is unseemly considering the collection of star dust that comprises me, flung from
the far universe in colors that burst from a black past
I picture an eye opening up and letting in all the light like a slow exposure camera or a torn
piece of lace
The black future whitens and whitens until it feels like a dream
Then my stomach growls I’m hungry
In my body there’s a settlement and that settlement is made up of the wishing well a hospital
where women have their babies a great many bars and sometimes an orange tree
The orange tree is best in winter when fruit orbits the trunk
Then little animals come and then little bugs
Even now I’m trying to control the outcome
My nose needs to be smoother I think so I pull on it creating gullies of oil letting blackheads
clear the surface disengaging flakes of skin
My hair needs to be smoother I think so I pull on it until it starts falling out in the shower in
the morning
This is what happens to a body in the finite economy
I don’t want to stick with it I want to expand and expand until I become nothing
As I walk from one end of the bridge to the other the signs become increasingly more
insistent
Isn’t it nice to be walking on a bridge?
Why don’t you go eat something?
Upon suggestion I take a breath and my stardust rattles in its glass jar and some spills out
and I start to wheeze and it becomes a thin dust on the railing in front of me
There are photographs of children taped here, on this bridge that rises now in a golden light
I will miss the capybara and the elephant
I will miss the tulip and the changing leaves
And even though I have the right equipment I’ve decided to miss the experience of
pregnancy
I will not give this world my baby
I will not give up my baby so easily
SUZANNE HIGHLAND is a queer writer, teacher, and native of Florida currently living in New York. She has a BA from Florida State University and an MFA from Hunter College, where she received the Miriam Weinberg Richter Memorial Award. She has also been awarded fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and Brooklyn Poets, and her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Yalobusha Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Bone Bouquet, No, Dear, and LEVELER, among others. Visit her at suzannehighland.com.
