melon baller - by Megan Amero

melon baller

by Megan Amero

i’m frightfully close to rot, maybe it’s already set in, as if i’m a clementine at the bottom of your backpack, field-tripped to death, five minutes away from spewing warm pulp into the lining, rotten orange blood up the seams

i need someone to scrape my heart clean, watermelon flesh balled out with a blunt-edged spoon, to have my hull dried out under the sun; make of me an impenetrable gourdshell of a woman.

i am not hard, i am difficult there is a canyon’s worth of distance between sun-dried and dumpster-bound the fault line between individual truths the valley between crimson and maroon

i would be happier if you just fixed my soft spots; take me out, tell me— knock your skull to test for ripeness, this is how beautiful an orange can taste

make the scoops rounder— like this, see?