Thorn Apple
Resin burns slowly.
Her thumbnail is matte crimson.
Earth spins widdershins.
She prays with sapphire beads, smoothing them between fingers. Sweat. Cool along her plump palm, catching the humid draft from a cracked window. The hush of bone calls for steadiness. She, on knees near the bed's edge, exhales. Thinking of all natural sins, every fire enumerated in ivory, every moment of hunger thinned in enamel. St. Anthony is laminated on candle glass, a warped gaze blooming from its wax flutter like her mother’s face glimpsed through the midday light refracting leaves of the backyard navel tree. She remembers mostly the way the rind’s perfume haunts her fingers. Tips that encircled the gaunt frame of her mother’s face troubled for sense. After years of a machine for kidneys, a machine drawing her mother’s final wind until everything is an insect bookmarked in amber.