Bonus Cut

This is Bonus Cut Poetry, a series that features original poems by Bonus Cut staff, artists and YOU! In this series, our mission is to bring people together in poetry, share stories and display wonderful artistic pieces. If you would like to have your poems in the next Bonus Cut Poetry installment, just email us at bonuscut@gmail.com

This installment features Bonus Cut’s own Abby Conklin.

Consent
By: Abby Conklin

When you cut into a kiwi fruit kept
in the fridge overnight, sliding knife
through furred skin, things feel easier
than they should.  It’s as if, that whole
time you slept, the fruit was wrapping
itself in firmness.  Lighting up hair
by hair, until its whole was stretched taut
in anticipation of the warm cup
of your hand, and the betrayal
of its paring knife, at six-something
on an October morning.

When you cut into a kiwi fruit left
out on the counter, however.
Then, after a night spent in the wash
that is Upper Manhattan coming
in through the screen of your kitchen window.

Be prepared.

This fruit has not been slowly drawn
into the farcical comfort of numbness.
It will not give so easily.  Flesh,
dimpling under the unkind point
of your steel, will raise an eyebrow
in question.  One chance,
it will be saying.
One chance.
Consider the full weight of your action,
balance precarious as it nudges
closer to the surface of a life.  Do you know
what you are doing?

Do you know
what you will have done?