Red apples are like red apples.
Can you see it when you close your eyes? 
And tell me, what’s that like?
I can see the word, recall the fleshy bite 
in the white kitchen my mother had just cleaned.
Can you see the red of the Red Delicious?

When the teacher told me to close my eyes and imagine
I could see the blackboard of my mind: fogged out,
chalky residue, static cling. Blackboards 
when I stared straight ahead. Blackboards 
when I closed my eyes. A small world, 
my imagination boarded up. 
No light in the closet.

Aphantasia, a voided mind, starless 
as the Mariana Trench.

I desperately clung to sounds, to words, 
to the thicket of a word like trench. 
How it traps you between its teeth. 
So apples became ideas, then beliefs
skinned in a story I wrote faster
than I could speak. 

But what about the apples? 

I go back to the kitchen, my mother telling me 
to be careful carving thin slices with a dull butter knife, 
dinner simmering before dad’s home. It all happened, 
so I can tell you about the waxy skin,
the red darkened like a shadow, a picture 
as good as it gets.