Pulp by CS DeWildt

She sits and rips skin from bone, fleshy truth. She devours the orange, laughs, flips her hair. Does she know she is my daymare? I watch her. I finger the lunch table’s scars: “mike is a faget”, “alicia luvs chris”. Her eyes flicker like a simile that’s like, I don’t know, something else? We rise upon orders from the bell. Old habits are unmurderable. I watch with dry orbs that linger only long enough to make me sweat, scanning to assure I’m not unwrapped by another. Her sunshine mingles among clouded peers. She hides from eyes that would stare until blindness. I write sad poems in my room, bold font verses that die with a keystroke whenever someone appears. “Can I get some help? I don’t get it. How do I balance this?” We ask the same questions. The answer is easy. “Put a ‘two’ in front of that oxygen. There you go.” She smiles and I want to tell her that she has flesh stuck in her teeth. But to tell her is to free that bit of pulp, a tawdry liberation by her purple, tooth-ravaged nails, and then to see it dropped to the floor, or at best, swallowed. My secret no longer. A non-thing. Indigestible roughage. It’s a pathetic parallel. It’s forced poetry. I read books that put it eloquently. Books with titles you could never have thought of yourself. My book is called Letch. Letch me teach you something about red ink. It’s my seed.

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