Apple
// Mark McKain
Red with adjectives, philosophy, secrets. Grandma’s gnosis and guilt grows on trees, hand-held volume swelling
from white blossoms, sauce and rot, cider and ale, our golden thirst, thing for pig’s snout, horse’s tongue,
celebration of kin, stoic and lush, sybaritic sin. Stem pliable and stubborn, umbilical, broken connection
to branch, trunk, root, soil, seed, peel bursting with tiny stars, blushing with emptiness of core. What if
we forgive the bruise, the worm boring into flesh, forgive the fall, praise gravity of fruit, forget Turning’s
dose, death, wisdom’s lost, still pressed from a poisoned apple?