EDITOR’S CHOICE AWARD
By Nicole Santalucia
If a fruit is a fruit is a fruit and sour is apples and birds are controlled by the government and lesbians have three leaves on their vine and someday I will paint a tree trunk for a safe place to hibernate and the tree won’t have fruit and I’m not sure if this tree is out of context but it keeps showing up when I look out the window and it looks like there’s a paper moon in the background and nipples in the sky and sometimes I catch myself thanking god that I am not a painter.
If a fruit is a fruit is a fruit and my right ear is freezing and my left ear is on fire and I am a lesbian breaking out of a lesbian brain and this is what it’s like to listen to other people so that I don’t hear myself and I called childhood on the phone and it hung up before I could get a chance to say: I don’t wake up every day thinking about apples, so how could I be addicted to apples? You’ll never trust yourself. Stop crushing all the apple seeds, they will kill you. Some words take longer and others slow down and maybe I need elocution lessons.
And when I was a kid I climbed a tree and broke into St. James to play god to play priest to drink the wine and it’s funny but not funny-funny and I might have plagiarized Manhattan when I wore her cheaters to look at paintings of all the trees that day when it snowed and we walked to the museum and held hands and kissed because it felt safe on the corner of 7th Avenue and 13th Street.