tangerine

A Poem by Saige

imagine if i could make the tangerine taste as good as my bittersweet memories are when i reminisce about high school.
they’re the space between her legs when she sits; the size of my heart.
more calories than yellow cigarettes and less dangerous.
don’t know how i feel about that just yet since i am on a diet for early death.
you could take the kingdom keys they hold and make a constellation on grass that hasn’t been mowed for a month and a half.
arrange the pre-autumn leaves and you can make it look like a galaxy contained in an eyeball.

tangerines are what childhoods taste like if you had time to be a child for a little bit.
before all the growing up got in the way,
and you remember then why you never wanted Peter Pan to grow up.
Cereal at six a.m. and soup on the roof.
her hands on my hips, before drawing a card from the deck on her bedroom floor.

and the texture isn’t a fruit. it’s
me screaming i love you outside your window when you peel it.
smells like teen spirit and reminds me of how we’re both in the dark,
only needing to be saved in the summertime,
and only just enough to get us through the next school year.

so when i eat the tangerine, i am not just eating the tangerine,
i am eating all my memories, all my roots.