Juice

---

by Andy Young

---

      winter hasn’t
   been cold enough
for the blood oranges
 
      to blood this year
   we give the pumpkin mouth
to the crows  the oak kneels
 
      to the ground like a camel
   its branches reach deep
into shade I want to be
 
      held in them as darkness
   fills my mother’s death-date
is coming so I start to turn
 
      and stare without looking
   as if I were another species
the other morning I cried
 
      at the farmer’s market
   as I talked to the mushroom
vendor mushroom vendors
 
      are gentle folk he was kind
   but puzzled    the helplessness
before the advance of tumor
 
      army clot arrest that bleak yawn
   fills the eyeholes like ink
mouths we must get the dead
 
      where they need to go
   where their decomposition
won’t embarrass their memory
 
      we gather the oranges spilled
   in the street by an unseen truck
some are split and seeded with asphalt

---

Andy Young’s second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and she is the author of four chapbooks. Her work has appeared or will soon in Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Drunken Boat. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s Program for Writers, her work has been translated into several languages. andyyoung.org

---