Still Life with Lemons in a Wicker Basket

I don’t want a basket full of lemons – 
I’ve had enough bitter times. 
Give me instead the flame-licked day
lilies opening so hard they are

breaking their own backs or that 
little porcelain bowl – its blue 
arcadia scrawled delicately as scar 
tissue – or a sip of that make-

believe tea steaming away for a 
century or two, or that woven basket – 
such regimented beauty – wicker 
sticks lined up all in a row like a little

boy’s ribs. Yes, give me instead those 
two carnations – prismatic bbs – 
so very white like how quartz is some-
times white and kind of blinding –

true opposite of all these shadows 
I have been carrying around in me 
for the longest time – shadows 
that are his hands moving across the light,

that are his hands moving across my 
body. O the hypersensitivity of the victim 
who finds even these lemons – 
their muscular rinds rendered in such

forensic light – threatening. Who is 
crying now because sometimes he misses 
being looked at. Who is older now. 
Who goes into galleries and clocks

the still lifes and feels this seismic 
mirroring as he encounters their 
codification – for if he cannot unpick him-
self, he can at least unpick the

lemons, lilies, basket and bowl. Bright 
symbols waiting for the sore and 
broken mind to rush in, inhabit. Brilliant
alarms burning against complacency.