Sariah Gibby
Orchid
Before I spit purple fire, you do not see me wave. I cast my green sails to the dull dust and feel nothing but the drip of ice, the tender touch of fly legs. My tails twist from the moss. They point at you, they shake. I am something until I breathe flame: then I am yours, and you never look to my roots. For the Peach Trees that Grow Where the Heart Falls All sidewalks lead to corn stalks growing in gutters. I think it's the way the wind blows: the swallowtail butterfly flaps its wings, and a breeze captures scraps of plastic bags, corn sprouts, and lost locust legs, tossing them to wastewater. Is this how great things come to be? Does history begin with brown chickens unearthing purple-flowered potatoes, toy soldiers, and cowbird skulls? Is time written in the star- ling droppings that drop cherry pits in seas, is it written in the clock of thirsty juniper rings? Is time written in the notches of my mother's back as she leans over the graping green tomatoes, kneading blue veins into black dirt, gathering mud into her brows and aging as each fleck sweats into invisible wrinkles, cracking her face like lightning or like the shells of the hollowed-out gourds she crushes beneath her knees while she weeds to the tunes of musicals: people sing as if guided by ghosts or God; she uproots the roots dripping with ants guided by pheromones. She pauses. Listens. Hummingbird powerline hum, cats stretching in the beets, katydids crack-leaping in the yellow rose thorns. She sits in her corn rows and feels beneath her palms the tunnels carved by rats as if to say, I'm here. She leans over the sunlines cast by the trellises and grapevines, and she traces the twin wings of a redhaven peach sapling that got lost amidst the rabbit-bitten cabbages, the white moths, and the burial dreams. Potato Salad Mom says the potato salad is heaven, that I should die on those egg white roads, paved with yolk. I eat heaven on warm summer nights, when we build fires and hear the maple tree’s green flesh hiss and rise in the smoke. Mom serves potato salad and whispers that the secret to heaven is apple cider vinegar and prayer. We sell our souls to celery, and we praise Grandma for her recipe that takes us to where she sleeps: a place that’s gold like pickle juice, but soft, like mayo and love. Sariah Gibby lives in the rocky mountains, where she writes about cows, crows, and cowbird skulls. Her obsession with show chickens and blue eggs grows by the day. She graduates with a bachelor's in English in May 2023, and she is published in the Sink Hollow literary journal. |