Coco Seney

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.

I’d tell her this is how I did it:
I picked the night, I picked the boy.
He was kind and liked me fine.

I picked the story.
It was a Christmas party, early December.
I wore an elf costume and face glitter.
   Bad Romance blared. I led him upstairs
       by the hand into his room.
            The bed was made; the idea
                pitched. And just like that,
                     it happened.
                     Glitter shed, I bled. Had to run
                         down the stairs, out the door.
                             Before midnight, that box
                                           was checked.

My friends taxied home
with me, called it a victory,
still called me Coco. My father
still called me Woopy.

Understand? Keep and lose
what you choose.

It may not be love, or even imaginable.
How the sheets may feel cool, 
their hands damp, your body 
learning. The bed of grass 
may feel damper yet, ants roaming.
Crickets may watch in symphony. 
The backseat, as good as any. 

Leave proof of you in the letting— 
swallow your sorry for bleeding.

I put on the sequin skin we save to wear when we are together.
How we look the same in it, skip to the same ragtag melody
carried since we were babies. I know we didn’t learn Bad Girls

from our mothers. And the world grew up around us raised by
the same God-fearing folk. We feared God too, but not so much

we stopped playing. We played in church. She folded paper dresses
out of Kleenex sitting in the pews. I held them in my lap holier

than communion. I still look for her paper dresses before we go out.
Now the pattern reminds me of her freckles, the fabric flecked and
curling like her chestnut hair that signaled to me once

              like a glow stick from the doorway of pre-K.

At recess in floral cotton leggings and oversized sweaters, we cocooned
into that yellow tunnel to hide from Georgina who pulled my hair.

              We started to make the most perfect patterns.

Before feet grew, we shared pink pointy toe shoes, A-cups in the locker room,
first periods we called purses, and wedding seasons six months apart,
orbiting like moons over our reflections on the lake she grew up on.

We both reemerged from the death of my pregnancy and her marriage in
ritual mourning, ready to dance, pulling out some costume we never planned,

her crochet halter, my silk tube top, both burnt orange, with gold-rimmed glasses.
We wore our hurt in our shoes and put the weight of our bodies against it

sweating out until our feet hurt worse than our chest, camouflaged
as each other on the dance floor fog making our way back
to the tunnel we know to hide in together when our hair is pulled.