Pamilerin Jacob

Dark Fruit

Lick-bait, it hung, glaring as an instruction
in noonlight. I put the choke-pear
in my mouth thinking it a jewel. 

The warm gash of error, my face
filled with thunderbolts
dashing out of the red mutilation 

in threads of white. Let me be disastrous
this one time, I whispered, as his syringe
sneaked its lean arm into me. 

All the ways we plummet
into fire, all the precious, unnamable
ways we dip our fingers into dirt 

in hopes of planting, but come
up punctured, aching, animal.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Pamilerin Jacob is a poet & editor whose poems have appeared in Barren Magazine, Agbowó, The Rumpus, Palette, Okay Donkey & elsewhere. He is the Curator of PoetryColumn-NND, a poetry column in Nigerian NewsDirect, a national newspaper.