Slice
Bananas unripe, and oranges. Coffee plantations surrounded by mountains, layers of deep blue fading into clouds, mist.
Shrillness of insects. Locusts. Now high, watching the buzzards circle, in their search for rats and snakes.
Up the mountain into a cave.
Even in this out of time town she felt pursued by some slow stirring thing. The very earth. Smell of wet jungle. Sweat. Urine. Heavy burnt sugar scent of flowers mixed with smoke from the Volcano. Smell of dry blood. Boars shot. Grunting of a boar escaping, caught, pulled by a rope, tethered in a trap, still shrieking. How could people live with this, under it, under the midday heat beginning so early in the morning, without it all thrusting through, quickening the pulse like the hump of muscle rising from the neck of a fighting bull. How could it not all make the hands quick to grasp the machete from the leather sheaf hanging close, so close and strike. Slice through another’s skin.
Sin Eater
The woman as a sin eater: for those who are frenzied in their grief.
For the man who smokes, drinks, gambles, is aggressively rude
For the woman who doesn’t see his sins as sins
For the dying who watch the moon change phases,
Thinking: Why is it taking so long?
No one said it would take so long….
The woman as a sin eater: for those who speak in tongues.
The easiest tongue to speak in is the one which absolves guilt.
The woman as a sin eater: for the woman who watches herself cry in the mirror.
The magic of her language is that every word waits to come true.
For the man who holds his lovers hypothetically.
These sins, Small as they are, are bitter as ashes.
These sins, Small as they are, can be eaten with a piece of hard candy pressed
To the sinner
Instead of the bowl of herbs and water and bread.
Required for the heavy sins.
The sins of the treacherous heart she pushes
And vomits back up again
Hard and smooth and cool as a stone.
— R. Khosrowshahi is a writer and orchid grower in Hawaii. She would be nothing without her steady hands.