Half-cooked

My mother’s mother planted me 
A world to return
From seeds, they have enabled me 
To grow a home 
A sanctuary first encountered 
In rich, interior bones

I mind my mind’s eye carefully and let it rest upon utopia. I tend tenderly to this garden, planting for the daughter of a daughter I’m yet to meet. 
Still. I can already taste the fruit on the tip of my hopeful tongue, as her appetite ripples through time. It lands in the centre of my belly. I smile at her, I wipe my brow. The shoreline speaks her name in mists of oceanspray. I’ll repeat it out loud when her tiny hands find mine.

In sleep, the moon appears before me as an impossibly thick tree. She penetrates peacefully, the earth and skies. Roots for dirt wisdom, branches for love-notes to clouds. I lean my sun-kissed back on hers, and sometimes she leans back.

A ladybug lands in the curve of my ear, follows its twists and bends, before entering my brain. She rests and falls asleep, having not yet encountered my skull’s left hemisphere. Something will awaken her soon.

A dream is what we call
What calls the shell to crack
What bids the beak to try
For air where seedlings float
Seeking dark soil when the time comes

In the northern hemisphere of God’s sleepdrunk cranium - a splattered plum, half-cooked by the heat of black August asphalt, mingles with a leaf that turned prematurely and fell mid-July. Peeling my gaze off leaves and sticky fruit, I look up the hill and repeat to myself; the horizon is a feeling. There was a time I thought a leaf was just a leaf. Back then, a plum was just a fruit. Now Earth has come alive, magic is afoot.