The Minutes Before The Grope
By Sarah Edwards


The boy standing on my foot, without airless gloves, “You are the cut-out grapefruit that lives in the elastic tower just around my bush?” I wanted to answer but my wisdom tooth was all out of metal exterior, the honesty your hand was poking for under the rear threads of my jeans short-shorts, was on indefinite leave to the pipe zipper on your khaki underpants. They had wrinkled saliva running through the ridges, every time you tried to zip up or down, a burdened bush tear fell between your protruding knees. I tried to catch it every hundredth fall, with my hallowed double lips, open and gaping, the raspberry flavored gelatin button you adore to clasp with wires. I let the currents run through my bagged mouth, then it was all pleasant that my loaded lips failed to feed on the glutinous drop, you sealed it every time with a dusting of a nod. It was just and all that my one gaze needed. In real time the pressurized foot was taking the form of a flat skin bread, you refused to wear the weighty fingers to cover your bald hands and kept staring in my entangled one eye, making agile water needed to salt the pores. The dawned question kept hitting the circular dot on my nose, in a 10 second constant pace. “O..Orr..Ore!” The yelp leaving my open flesh was unrecognizable. You twisted the heel of your arched brick, pale with bare cracked nerves. It was a mistake, a toe sprained wrong I had done and you were a stone figure, bathing in ashes. “Ore is just a material, the bush is what matters to any berry with grown hair.” I saw it without any eye prick. The immobilization of air that you gifted me was a direct response to the praise of over flowing hedges. I pleased you. This time the toe was non-feeling. You took the erased question, now visible and multicolored and nailed it, with the addition of your fingernails , to the sides of both of our cheek bones. And then the fingering was aligned with the question. We will forever sprout as shrubs of juiced pebbles.


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Sarah Edwards is a writer and/or a poet. She likes to push boundaries of literature and language. Her work is experimental and somewhat avant garde. She breathes in Annapolis, MD for now.