Anatomy of the Lemon: Placenta

First, a confession: I have eaten many of them. Countless.
Lemons are one of my favourite childhood foods,
and like oranges, I eat the columella for completion’s sake.
Completion? You ask. Well, it wasn’t OCD.
I looked up the anatomy and learned:
I eat lemons, pulps, placentas, and all.

Anatomical emphasis for frugivores: lemon is 0vary.
Not O like Orange but 0 like 0bl0ng, pr00f that
fruit is font and font is anatomy and anatomy is destiny.

Leafing aside the fallopian twigs, knotwithstanding arborisms…
The peel I rarely eat (they get ground up into cookies or icing or composted)
the 0rgan in the 0vary (((0))),
(note the nested hierarchy 
((I could have said ovarian organ)) 
Aristotelian qua peripatetic)
the 0rgan that seeds explaining stuttering wh00psie daisy-yellow uh-0

Lemon w0mb dissolves tooth enamel, the reversal of Freud’s V. dentata,
contributor to my adult dental erosion.
How could I have not known?
Ironically, lemons dissolved, drip by acidic drop, my baby teeth, too slowly to see.
They fell out before they fell apart.
Witness! The false security from not living the recurring nightmare of teeth falling out.
Watch! The geological parallels of sleepily grinding Alps into Appalachians,
revealing sedimentary mineral layers and geode cavities.
As always, childhood is one step faster than fate, 
	(lemon-eating kids getting away with it)
adulthood is always one more step further into it,
	(we live with the consequences of eating delightful acids)
and both blindfolds of age
 are both sides of the same 0blivi0us unseeing desire for lemons.

For me, the lengths of lifetimes were measured in teeth.
The hourglass that flipped from one stage to the other
was a yellow 0.



Amoeba is an Astronomer

under whose microscopes we sleep in stabbing light
-Marc di Saverio (2020). Crito Di Volta, 31.

Amoeba has spent hours measuring 
the distance between illuminator and aperture. 
Pseudopods akimbo, trying different contractile vacuoles
as lenses, the protoplasm imagines formulae.

Amoeba has to explain gravity.
Gravity makes no sense to a creature with no up, down, or direction.
But there is a “below” now, unlike the tumult of pond scum.
The illuminator proves there is such thing as “direction”
and beyond that, Amoeba cannot see.
The between-space between slides, though, 
has different textures of dimensionality than pond scum.
There are limits where the light of the illuminator
begins to glare against two transparent boundaries.

Amoeba, and the rest of them, let the light shine through.
Their bodily images become artworks on the upper slide.
Images of themselves pass through the glass transparency.
Amoeba decides that the slide sky has constellations
describing life on the slides. The life can organize themselves,
even organize each other, and create narratives out of their images.
Amoeba is the opposite of an astrologer:
what happens inside the world determines what is written on the sky.

The opposite of illuminator is oculus.
Oculus changes distance, and does so all-of-a-sudden.
Amoeba’s endoplasmic flow and search for prey
are two ways to measure velocity.
Amoeba wishes for parallax.
What is between the slide and the oculus?
Maybe there are two spheres, illuminator and oculus,
nested between them is a crystalline horizon.
Amoeba is an Aristotle.
Amoeba lives for van Leuwenhoek’s cosmology, Galileo’s imagination.



Birds Look at the Time

My spade is the earth
and my hands turn the spade.
Five minutes of sunlight
turn my shadow five minutes east.
Clouds cast shadows.
Castes of birds fly between tree tiers.
My spade turns over,
more dirt turns over,
another brown bird hops near me
and peers into the dirt.

Sap of deadly nightshade on my hands.
I remember not to touch my eyes.
Clouds shade me 
but can’t shade me from pollen.
Intermittent sun must change 
the colour of my eyes
but I cannot see it.
My spade is on the ground
beside some dirt
and I am not yet done with it.

Every bird has black eyes today
but somehow manage to reflect me.
From where is the black in their eyes reflected?
My eyes are also not mirrors
But I see the birds and they look at me.
My spade is on the ground beside a brown songbird.
The songbird looks at me and does not sing.
Another bird flies over me and sings,
Although it does not look down at me.
If they are waiting for me and my part,
they must be satisfied with me picking up my spade
and turning over more dirt.


Terry Trowbridge's poems have appeared in Synchronized Chaos before. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first two writing grants.