from COMPANY by Emily Hunt


 
 
I keep shifting the stems around
until they face forward
and lie flat.
The thorns and knobs
bump into each other
and throw it all off.
The worst are the kumquats,
which fall to the floor
as soon as I add them.
It isn’t natural
for a thin stem with fruits
to sprout up –
they’re heavy,
they’re supposed to just hang.
They scatter, get smashed
and stick to my shoes.
I have one and taste the chemicals.
It’s fine to eat the skin.
At the end of the shift,
my broom sticks and skids
across the places they’ve been.

*

When I come across flowers
at people’s apartments
in cloudy water, or for sale
by the liquor store
on my mottled walk home
from the bus, divided by category
into the same dinged buckets
we stack by the entrance
and roll on cold carts
to the trucks, I resist
picking them up
like they’re mine.
Plucking bad petals from them.
Those that lean out
from the center
open to workers and wind
passing over,
as separate as they are attached,
gathered outside the lit interior,
wrapped in paper
and grown from thin air,
these are especially tempting.
The sound of the action,
this pull from the stalk
away from the style,
is nearly mute but
briefly satisfying.

*

Flattened, twisted,
toothpaste tubes
clashing on a dusty washcloth.
The white charger of a toothbrush
with a tiny head, plugged in.
I shower in the afternoon
when no one else is home,
my greasy phone on a ledge
past the curtain in steam.
Little sun leaks in.
There are shampoo bottles lined up
in staggered rows
on the chipped sill
left by those who lived here
last year, years before.
Some nearly empty,
blobs clogging their openings,
others closed and heavy.
The opaque ones you judge by their weight.
Under the shortest, strongest
streams to the scalp,
the taste of metal
slips in my washed mouth.
I imagine consolidating
then swirling them
into one pallid liquid.
The dregs of each kind
left to dry.
A patch of light
crosses my breathing eye,
hair darkened against me.
My limb dips
where the chased vein crosses
the warm blue, the only
living system I own.
Flushing I wish him dead.
Cloudy substance in hand.
I would then rinse and recycle the bottles.
They would go on to be part of some pile.
White plastic in soil.

*

Because I am immediately warm to him
at 7 am, my coworker
shows me an app to download.
Access to the radio in any country.
He says he never browses,
he always chooses a program
similar to that TV series
Cheaters,
in which the lies of boyfriends
and husbands are revealed live
as women are filmed crying
in dark, ecstatic relief,
finally found to have been
right all along,
their faces loud, damp
skin in flashing light.
Were women caught too?
I can’t remember,
I watched it in elementary school.
I’m confusing it with COPS,
a “reality ride-along” that became
the longest running show on Fox
once America’s Most Wanted
was canceled after 23 years.
I felt the ancient ugly
blur of a near-laugh
quickly withdrawn
when a Cheaters cop had curves,
long hair tied back,
the drawl of a girl at work,
and she turned the wheel
navigating with ease
a dim neighborhood of adults,
and she slammed on the brakes,
screeching the car to a halt.
Belt cinched at her waist,
the policeman then barged
into a stained, carpeted room
where no one expected her.
Cheaters airs on Saturday nights
and you can stream it forever.
I assume the plot
of the first episode
of the newest iteration
is essentially the same
as it is in every episode
of every brutal season
apart from the updated
graphic design,
a gold cracked heart
under a magnifying glass
that also serves as the C
in Cheaters, and falls like a rock
into place on screen
as the theme song
“Broken Hearted” strikes up –
Cheating is a crime,
it happens every day
There are people running around,
soon they’ll have to pay –

and apart I assume
from the quality, the subtleties
of each core conversation
fueling, directing,
gaging the many
individuals involved–
their warm enemies and lovers,
their love run dry.
I listen as I sweep and prep
the bruised and thirsty product
to Julianne Moore
on Fresh Air instead.
Her exquisite life
floats unbelievable,
material, carried,
real and she delves in soothed,
soothingly, as if
lunching at the leafy edge
of the world’s shadow,
relaxed as she reflects
mildly touched
by its scope, nearly melting
with pleasure as she relays,
neutral as a stream,
a previous terror or stress
she refers to like a book
she’s torn through
so casually with Terry, so clearly
she’s conquered it, she’s rich,
lives in New York at times LA
and she laughs at the thought
that her past pressed down
a metal plate on her breast
as she recounts
her last child’s little habits
in the bricks and foam of Greece.
The traveling sound
of two women competes
with the bad blaring music
my manager has chosen,
but I can still hear Terry,
a host so practiced at pulling out
the voice of a person flung far beyond
their mundane birth,
warmed by the memory
of being nobody,
brushing off the dirt.
To hear it at work,
a loosening distance,
small teeth in the memory,
biting the cloth net,
an occasional thorn
scratched against metal,
my hand hot from my phone,
I drag the cursor back
when I get distracted
by the percussive ads,
missing key parts,
telling pieces,
telling rampant stories
to my future as I fill
fifty-five budget cans
to which I’ve glued gold
floral paper
with dangling kumquats
and flowers, plastic-wrapped
food packs, and hot pink
anemones, their intricate centers
the dark triumphant ends
of long, fuzzy stems
cut with classic orange scissors
to similar lengths,
and as I deftly
band to them
limp green bags of water,
cool like toy organs,
for drinking in transit,
to ensure they will
survive a ride
on a truck loaded long ago
with heavy, organized
carts of crawling succulents.
 
 
 
Emily Hunt’s poetry collection Dark Green (The Song Cave, 2015) was named a “standout debut” by Publishers Weekly and a “Must-Read Poetry Debut” by Lit Hub. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, the PEN Poetry Series, The Iowa Review, TYPO, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and works as the Programs Manager at the Poetry Society of America. More info at emilyrhunt.org.