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.
Coco Seney is a poet based in Houston, with roots in Kansas City and Chicago. She is completing her debut chapbook, Going Back for the Girls, shaped through the CharlotteLit Chapbook Lab in mentorship with poet Nickole Brown. Her work centers women’s interior worlds—what is shared in bar bathrooms, carried in bodies, and learned over time. Her poems ask how human pastness might be sacred, preserving memory through the retracing of girlhood, millennial culture, and ghost lives. Seney works in innovation and entrepreneurship, holds a BA from Rice University and an MBA from the University of Virginia. Find her @ReadCoco.