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How to eat an orange

MBIRA
Orange juice .jpg

Illustration by Reili Evart

by Rabia Kapoor

Always experiencing in halves,
The way people in platonic relationships
Share an orange
              down the middle,
With the sticky sweetness of words coating their fingertips
While watchers sit in their corners
The strangest fluttering of a dream, beneath their waxy eyelids
I see you in my sky
I walk you through my  garden
(Grow beyond act one)
But never do I look at you
The way your knees bend when you cross your legs

Or the way you draw lines on your palm,
As if predicting tomorrow
How territorial the art of observing,
To the watcher and the dark dark eyes
That cause an incessant
                                      hunger
To be stuck where you are without seeing your best friend
Platonically sharing an orange
It is watched, the act.
The curve of dehydrated peel on the floor
And the little explosions of citrus
Perhaps there is an art in this somewhere
In seeing and not doing
But I guess we will never understand it,
This obsession poets have with fruit.

Mbira is currently a struggling dreamer with no time.

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