M.J. Arlett

Grandmother as Changing Seasons

A new season is coming, the mornings violet and velvet.
Leaf-mottled path, mahogany smell,

the draped skirts of rain trawling across the rooftops
and a fox knocks the dustbins over.

I wake, a sudden draft. Six months gone.
Summer has passed.

---

Fruit Bowl

Scalpelled from my thyroid, a stowaway
the size of a plum.

I always suspected my body was a garden.
Told, so often, all the ways I could be plucked
and eaten.

Logical, then, that I should harbour fruit.

After the surgeon’s harvest,
I hunted for edible scraps,
stopping everyone I met
to hold
their features

in my fruit-stained hands

Crabapple in my new love’s neck,
peach fuzz hair
on a baby cousin’s arm, and plums,

always plums,
swollen and juice-ridden,
good for sticky faces, best for gorging.




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M. J. Arlett is an MFA candidate at Florida International University where she is the nonfiction editor for Gulf Stream Magazine. She was born in the UK, spent several years in Spain and now lives in Miami. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Mud Season Review, Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, Tinderbox Poetry and elsewhere.