My hunter-girl lays ground-cloth,
plucks fruit from vine,
tends to budding sprouts, harvests squash
in the fall, kills fields for
the winter. She brings home
vine-ripened tomatoes in deli-quarts,
orange red purple indigo cherries,
heirlooms the size of my fist,
passed from hand to hand.
Watch her, she roams
off path, pocket-knife
to cut down trails
of fungi. Imagine it like this:
mother-log burdened
from sustaining,
sucking on wood-teat, then
she, my girl,
a hunter, my gatherer, bringing home
mushrooms for frying,
for sautéing, for dicing
and chopping, and slicing
into bites. I am loved
so gently in this rough
world, fork to teeth,
lips to rosemary.
Among the rows of trellised fruit,
hands castrating, clipping overripe
produce from plant, my hunter-girl,
sinks teeth into bug-
bitten flesh. Calloused fingers,
nailbeds sticky with garlic scape-sap,
palms open-face blistered, her ode to dirt,
brushed off her pants
and onto our bed, our soliloquy to the earth-
worms who make their way
into our mouths,
and then away.
When I ask her if the aching
in her bones keeps her
up at night, she tells me she needs more
space to think.
She is always so hungry,
my growing girl.
It never hurts enough
when she tries to eat me.
Laid out over the dinner
table, in lieu of dinner,
fear by way of bed-time story,
she tells me that green peppers
are consumer creation.
She says they were made
to sell the red and yellow
who couldn’t grow fast enough
for the plow, made to remain
unmatured by machine-knife.
Farm-work is an act of care,
an act of profit: seed or sale.
These unripe peppers,
ever children,
by-product of over-
consumption,
of mouth, my mouth against the floorboards,
scraped teeth on mahogany,
walk on tiptoes
on our splintered apartment floor.
While she talks, I wonder
if I have sewn our seed
too early in the year
to see bountiful harvest.
Respite takes place only under this
cataclysmic pressure.
I heave under the universal
labor of telling the one I love
what I mean. What a privilege it is
to share our miscommunication.
My mother-gatherer, this-hunter-girl—
thank God, I am not yet my father.
Day after day, my hunter tends to variations,
this endless supply of cherries
that comes forth right before the frost.
The juice stains her face bruise-yellow.
I can’t help but worry about the violence
of production when I crush
them in between my teeth.
Like this.
In the night, my hunter touches my forehead,
wraps her arms
around my waist. She doesn’t know
that I am ruptured in all wrong places,
beaten and bent. I am growing infertile with
worry. I can’t stop thinking
about the green in the fields. All I have
is encased in half-heartedly
in the community garden
down the street,
garden untouched, garden rotted
fruit, fall to the ground, seed-
splayed upon the cement,
rabbit food, squirrel
picked, my garden grows
with its back turned to me.
When I tell her I am scared
of how much is growing
outside my control,
what I really mean is
what if it never stops? What if forever
is a sword plunged into folds
of skin, a blade that pierces
but never punctures?
There, there, sweet girl, sick girl, lover
girl: My hunter smells rot in the air
but doesn’t move to fix it. Let nature
move without course-correction.
She hypothesizes agency
until the sun goes down.
I do not like to ask for help, I say,
as hunter-girl reminds me my pain
moves through me like water,
she tells me that ebb and flow often just mean
flowing-and-flowing-and-flowing—
on my knees, hunter-girl,
I am on my knees for you.
There is no evil in the world
save the space
our bodies make together,
pressed into the grass
so green.
