SPOON
Look at yourself in the back of my head. You do not have to make sense. This is not a self-portrait. It is a lonesome amoeboid diner and you, about to stir non-dairy cream into coffee. Had you squeezed the plastic walls with too much exuberance, you would have seen it explode the way laughs do at another booth. Someone somewhere is always getting along.
CACTUS
Either it is staring or has ignored you. You do not have time. Is it good to be slow? A life made of waiting, how strenuously does it want? The connotation is you’ve wasted your life, what have you done, you haven’t. But waiting is a life. A sheet of photographic paper absorbs all available light.
LEMON
Not enough to say smoke. Pulled from the fire, a branch feels wet. What if your origin is unknown? Then you can only be described. Secrets harbor — just below the skin, fragrant oil. To itself, a thing is ordinary, uninflected. It arrives: the explorer with his catalog. Acid he says, sour he says, and because no one else has said it, it is so.
Laton Carter's writing has recently appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Indiana Review, Shirley Magazine, and The Sunlight Press. Carter works in a middle school in Western Oregon.