lemon vodka by B. Rocha

Soft Boys Love Better, Benjamin Lomeli

lemon vodka

poetry by B. Rocha

trauma filled daisies, smelling fresh with lilac bruises. lilacs were the botanical beauties my grandmother wore around her hips-printed on fabric, hanging to her ankles, long and light-weighted not unlike the feathers that were plucked from my body one pluck, two pluck, three fuck, four. fuck was the forbidden fruit that fell off the lemon tree that i laid under in the summer.

iced tea with extra ice to put in a cloth and then under my eye. beauty beholds nothing but death-you were ten when you discovered vodka, your breath reeked of nothing. water filled to the rim of the bottle, spilling out like spaghetti noodles from your dural sack. your spine was never meant to hold two hundred and fifty pounds of flesh, of hatred. as you lay there, crushed,

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under the weight of the fallen lemons, resting in dead oak leaves, your body only feels the crackles of the brown and dried brush beneath you.

a lemon falls into your mouth and you taste the sour, the sweet, the bloody seeds as they caress your gums. puckering up for a kiss from death, as you chase the sour with more vodka. reminiscing on the times in which you were nothing more than a fetus, innocent and smelling of lilacs.

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