Citrus Aurantium Dulcis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Nicole Zuckerman

been struck. Nothing that memorable. What tears there were only seemed to acknowledge this lonesome fact about him. After a while most of them just stopped talking, drank their IPAs, and waited for the dawning to come incrementally through the glass blocks high on the wall.

At eight a.m. their peloton crept down Market en masse, motley of polyester, Judge in front with a traverse towing the riderless ghost bike, the fixie ’ s pedals paddling over the asphalt like drumbeats to some silent dirge. The lot of them was too egalitarian to ride rank, but Libby sensed the preferred outriders and kept her front wheel back. Their dogs trotted alongside. Judge hit the stoplights at greens and yellows and they rode through reds like a passing barge, just try it, not a single honk, and went down 19th Street for a full lap around Rittenhouse Square before dropping deeper into South Philly. When they reached the corner where the messenger had been lost, they dismounted, and they quickly fastened the painted ghost to the stop sign, U-locks, padlocks, and chains. She thought someone might say something. Someone should say something. But all of them, thirty or forty, scattered like marbles through the chutes of Center City.

Citrus Aurantium Dulcis

By Nicole Zuckerman

Before breakfast, I will love you with the bag of oranges I have taken from the kitchen, while you lay sleeping

I will wake you softly at first tracing the warm hum of your body orange by orange rounded crown, slender, faintly toothed

I will slice the fruit under ripe, unwashed into pieces without paring sieving with my fingers until slippery smooth

I will steep you in citrus layer you in pulp and peel spooning tepid juices the length of your toes parting your lips tender, firm, salient

I will love you before breakfast in the dark orange by orange until our bed, rooted in your hips, elbows, thighs is as fecund as an orchard high hammock, deep loam summer sweet

Nicole Zuckerman: I am an ESL teacher in Pennsylvania always looking for new ways to challenge students to view language as a unique form of self expression. I am an avid collector of poetry, as well as aspiring to be a poet worthy of those whom I collect. I love flea markets and auctions and I seek out ephemera because I see beauty in that which defines our daily lives.

Chad Willenborg teaches writing at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, though his resumé tracks stints as a bartender, a gravedigger, a dry ice blaster, and a wild game packer. His work appears in McSweeney ’ s, The Believer, Fugue, First City Review, and The Best of Philadelphia Stories (Vol. 2). Two excerpts from his novel, Suit of Lights, were finalists for CityPaper ’ s annual writing contest, and "Stone and Paper and Vinyl and Skin, " winner of the 2014 Marguerite McGlinn Prize, is a third excerpt from that novel. The author is at work on a book called The Sexton and a collection of “ cover versions ” of James Joyce ’ s Dubliner.