The boy drew his name in the fog of his breath, on the window looking over the garden built around the apple tree
The one with the tyre swing painted red
The one whose roots now held a tin of his treasures in its grasp;
a sack of rainbow marbles, a deck of dueling cards, a rose stem and an egg sandwich
The one that shivers with squeals of his youth
The one, where he found his mother now a loose limb tethered by twine,
her face an overripe blueberry, her skin ash and her hands bark
and wipes it away; his first act of disappearance.
Now he calls himself something other than his name.
Now he is someone that smiles with his fist and kisses like shrapnel
His mouth tastes like rust and his chest is a medicine cabinet attached to his spine with an uncapped tube of cotton candy lipstick and a leopard print scarf,
And a wet towel and a burning pie in the oven, and lemon scented kitchen counters and black pepper tickling his nose.
Now the boy is a boy no more.
Now the man only eats pies with a burnt crust and egg sandwiches on a hook he pulls over a toilet bowl
But sometimes when his legs -like aluminum pins- fail him, he empties in his bed
Which he shares only with his gun.
And bloody coins, and cigarettes stained cotton candy with lipstick
and a stomach like a faultless lemon rind-ribs despairing gateways against his skin
And teeth marks on his blue-veined arms and rose stems growing out of his eyes-their petals kissing down his cheeks
And fire, uncivilized, making a shrine of his body as the neighbors
baptize their manicured lawns with sighs of wet relief; their mourning now at an end.

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Leano Ranko is a full-time B.Eng Industrial student and emerging writer born and raised in Botswana, Southern Africa. She credits her introduction to poetry to Tichborne’s Elegy, dug into the back cover of a bible she stole from the back seat of a taxi.

Photo: Alex Iby