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"Street Art - Brick Lane, London, UK" by Olivier Schopfer

​Fruit by Tariq Luthun

​as kin rise to pray in the deepest shade
        before each dawn, i ask: what is it about
                     a seed shedding itself into
                     a seed reborn that makes it
        its name? still i wait, as though there is
                     no time for question through the
                    tired feast we become in this
        moonlight before the fast. mama speaks:
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​
        eat, eat. go on. take, take.
                      and i take
                      after my father
        who used to pull crabapples
                     ripe off the trees
                     steady-fencing this
        morbid crackle of roads

        that will never belong
        to us. as my mother runs
                    her wet fingertips into dates
                    beneath the rinse, my father would
        say: ​americans are
                     too busy watching good fruit
                     wither away
.
        too busy wrapping their teeth

        around the skin of other things
        in the evening hours. meanwhile,
                     we just gnaw through that. he and i
                     take all of our time--
        it is the only thing our women ask of us.
                      and, again, i ask:
                      what makes a brown boy his
        name? when does he become

        a feast of ​yes,
        a game of​ eat, eat. take, take.​ a riddle:
                      what color of boy doesn’t eat
                      what his mother makes him?
        what being could leap
                     out of a seed and walk
                     upright just long enough
        to inhale the dirt that will see him

        a man? here, we get tired of this
        script, muddled
                     film of hardened juice, and thickened
                     erasure; the shedding of
        flesh into soil. ​O how much
                      easier can we be to take?

                      another generation passes
        into the wake, and mama prays in the moonlight

        before the fast. this is where i come
        to learn why a mother gives
                      her kin a name that lingers, a name
                      that only we can pronounce.

Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American strategist and poet from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Among other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts Press, and is co-founder of the new PoC-dedicated literary arts series FRUIT. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review,and Button Poetry, among other credits. He is a deep dish pizza evangelist, and stays up at night wondering how many books Luther Hughes has licked.

Olivier Schopfer lives in Geneva, Switzerland. He likes to capture the moment in haiku and photography. His work has appeared in The Red Moon Anthology of English-Language Haiku 2014 as well as in numerous online and print journals. He also writes articles in French about etymology and everyday expressions: http://olivierschopferracontelesmots.blog.24heures.ch/
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