"Embrace of the Serpent" by Nam Das
Apples by Gabriel Mundo
It is only in this part of the country
where apple picking is considered romantic.
We walked through the orchard
filled with the heavy fruit
stopping occasionally to comment
on a particularly fat one.
Like a small red moon.
Like blood from a paper cut.
It was you who told me
that the God of Fruit’s teeth
are pitted with cavities.
It was you who told me
that if you pick something,
it’s a sin to let it spoil.
where apple picking is considered romantic.
We walked through the orchard
filled with the heavy fruit
stopping occasionally to comment
on a particularly fat one.
Like a small red moon.
Like blood from a paper cut.
It was you who told me
that the God of Fruit’s teeth
are pitted with cavities.
It was you who told me
that if you pick something,
it’s a sin to let it spoil.
Gabriel Mundo is from Highwood, Illinois and is currently a student at Carroll University in Wisconsin. His most recent work can be found in Nightjar Review, Tint Journal, Plainsongs, and Burning House Press. In the fall of 2019, he was selected as a finalist for the Scotti Merrill Award.
Nam Das (Filipino, b. 1989) creates open-ended visual stories by arranging figurative elements into an assemblage forming a central idea, an idea that plays around Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious or mythologems observed throughout history. He uses a limited palette of four colors in his oil paintings. Also called the Zorn palette, it's composed of: Titanium White, Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre and Ivory Black. Nam began working as a full-time painter in 2019.
