Avocado, Avocado
BY DANUSHA LAMÉRIS
I feel rich whenever I have a bowl full, their glossy alligator skins
gleaming under the kitchen light. Pear-shaped packets
of creamy green flesh. Preferred food of Aztecs and Californians.
Botanically, a berry with a single seed. Made to mash with onions
and cilantro, a squeeze of lemon. Or in some locales, to mix with sugar
and milk. Whenever we come back from the market, a bag bursting,
I want to dance around the room, throw my hands up in the air.
My brother and I ate through boxes of them in summer, drizzled
balsamic and olive oil into the scooped-out middle. Little bowls
of emptiness, hollow vessels. How much we lose in any given life.
How much we can never regain. Even so, the world keeps making
these tender fruits as if it was all there was to do—avocado, avocado
on repeat. I say it like a catechism, a prayer for plenty, for the good
that was, that (please may it be so) is still to come.
Second Sight
BY DANUSHA LAMÉRIS
Back then, it freaked my friends out I knew things
I had no way of knowing, like that the 680 East
would be closed the next day, a trip to Tahoe, cancelled.
Or how I called my boyfriend the night before the giant quake,
told him Something big is going to happen tomorrow. And
when it hit, I was in the open field everyone else was running to,
watching at a distance as windows cracked, chunks of glass
falling to the ground. What’s next? they’d ask, as if I’d know
or as if knowing would do any good, the world still coming down
around us: children kidnapped from the corner store, poison
in the water, planes shot from the sky. So when I dreamt
my parents’ house exploded, I hoped it was a metaphor
but a week later a fire climbed the dry scrub uphill
and torched the gas lines. My family got out but lost
almost everything: photographs, Christmas ornaments,
my grandmother’s gold. Though the gift of seeing is
something I think I got from her, my mother’s mother,
if such a thing can be passed down. A rogue strand of DNA
slipped into the chain, a code for here’s what’s coming,
for beware. Useless, maybe. Or maybe the way our line
survived, a pantry full of extra stores, an escape route
cut through the underbrush, a knife at the ready.
