Feature image by Frederik Ruysch. From Thesaurus animalium primus, 1710. Image source: Public Domain Review.

orange, how it festers:
a stomach, digesting itselfinto platoons
of orange trees, orange leaves

you count crevices of your palms
secret ferns, nothingbut a pithy city

i’m dreaming

about landscapes i’ve never seen, a node
of chrysanthemums, blooming into fever,
a city built of bodies, bodies of ferns

the ferns are whispering orange,shifting
for the humidityof the shelled soil like
palms, hundreds ofpalms
building cities like handprints

an orange, plucked, a fester, a fist—
we eat dead things to stay alive

Abi Pollokoff
Abi Pollokoff is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of Washington, where she teaches and interns for The Seattle Review. Her work has appeared in 14 Hills, Bayou Magazine, and H_NGM_N, and is forthcoming from inter/rupture and Broadsided Press. A former editor-in-chief of the Tulane Review, she won the 2012 Anselle M. Larson/Academy of American Poets Prize for Tulane University and was a finalist for the 2013 Fellowship to the Writing by Writers Workshop.