Poem I Wrote For Matt Tracey, Nadia's Response

Dear Matt,
I am sitting on an apple.
Here is my face: red and wet.

In a tree petrified over a swamp
There are twenty-three buzzards, ripe,

And only rare droppings alongside
Rare rain prove them alive.

A gun is going off, Matt.
A chainsaw is going at it.
Unwilling insects are droning--
Louder, I shatter
An apple.



NADIA:



dear bel,

I knew that apple back
when he was a blossom,
spreading his sordid pollen-
nodding anthers, filament, node, and bolus,
while carpels sighed open, each
seed still dank white, as arsenic or lime,
the dicotyledon alchemy not to occur
'til eight full months from the blossom's drop.

yet the buzzard's black crop crammed
and stinking: this bird's digestion has
no role to play in apple's red drama.
the buzzard's the curtains, all twenty-three
of them, falling sequentially over the stage's
thick soils, where beetles crab and grub,
and saplings mewl for phosphate, nitrogen,
pneuma, sawdust, bones, and oil.

now i have to fight nadia to the death. but i don't want her to die.