Forgotten among
corn and bean, Oaxaca
remembers you
stringless, sweet-fleshed
yellow-skinned, white-meated
spiny leaves, light green fruits:
small sugar, yellow crookneck,
caserta.
I core your dulcet flesh-secrets,
slide steel between
your layers.
Soft, palmately
lobed leaves, curving
tendrils,
your husk, vessel
like cupped
hands, mouth.
I curl into your
darkness, curve,
your leathery skins becoming
home.
Loralee Clark resides in Virginia; Instagram @make13experiment; website sites.google.com/view/loraleeclark; SubStack nosuchthingasfailure.substack.com. She has a book forthcoming, “Solemnity Rites”, with Prolific Pulse Press LLC and has been published most recently in Lucky Lizard, Nature of Our Times, Unearthed, Nebo, Choeofpleirn Press, Wingless Dreamer, The Taborian, Superpresent, Thimble Literary Magazine, and Impossible Task.