I spit watermelon seed and the boy-not-me catches one in his hand, drills a hole with his index finger in the dirt by my bare feet, saying it will grow into a city like me-not-him, from roots, foundations that will ground me and I say I’m a girl-not-him so I have no bricks in me, and he says bricks are made of straw, I should not be so unyielding, so I take shelter with him from the rain under a hawthorn tree to watch my city grow from the watermelon seed in the earth, first the shoot sprouts a sapling to vines that grow like ivy on the library walls, like the boy’s body and mine, grow out and round, and hard and soft, and stretching and reaching, entwining and growing toward light, and hungry I light a fire to boil a pot of reclaimed rain and night dew straight from the vine, and cut watermelon rinds with the knife he gave me, leave some out for the rabbits and wild deer and cut slivers to be candied, blanching to coat in sugar syrup from the vine and feed these candied crescents to him until he sleeps, and I slip into the living city, climb stalks, and find a bough to rest in with creatures-not-us living there, and we listen to the once-boy-now-man snore, as leaves encroach on my window of him, laid out under the hawthorn tree, until he’s gone, his seed buried in that underworld as my city climbs into the sky, so close to the next world I could grab the moon and bend down to bore a hole through rain clouds into the earth with my index finger, to grow another earth-not-this-earth for our descendants-not-our-children and their watermelon metropolis.

About Rosaleen Lynch

Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London, with words in lots of lovely places you can check out at 52Quotes.blogspot.com.

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