BOBBY PARROTT

The Spring-Loaded Anatomy of Strawberries in their Brainy Box

In the lost currency of a youthful face
the fluffy green kales and parsleys
at the produce aisle's entrance know,
all of them, that the end is near. So
 
when you shaved my head, was it so
we'd be compatibly aerodynamic,
or was it to encourage others to tear
 
off my ears as if I were a head of lettuce?
The produce manager lowers his head,
closes his thick eyes, and murmurs, "Lettuce
spray," gesturing to the wall of vegetables,
blinking at the congregation of shoppers, mist
 
clouding my pandemic goggles and the flavors
I'd planted behind my alternate selves. Here
the child in me spins to let the silence preserve
 
its roar even as the little Bobby prototype
headlines the somersaulting hive of himself
 
outside this fickle frame's edge. And Oh,
a mother who stays on the phone speaking
into a future she'll jettison, ushered out
of the store by her Marlboro Reds in the Box.
 
We make shallow fingernail scratches
in the surface of time, bullied by blank gossip
of what should have been, half-dissolved
soaps purring their frosty foams of bite-me,
chunks of white chocolate lathed smooth
for deliberate teeth we endlessly replenish.    

Bobby Parrott's poems appear or are forthcoming in Spoon River, RHINO Poetry, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, and elsewhere. In this queer writer's own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule called Fort Collins, Colorado.