Clementine in January

The peel gives way like a held breath releasing, and the room fills with a sun that was packed in a crate, shipped through the dark, and carried up three flights of frozen stairs to ripen in the lamplight on my desk.

Each segment a small lantern, the white threads clinging like the memory of the branch it forgot it ever had. I divide it the way the old men divide an argument— slowly, and without winning.

Outside, the street is a long erasure of snow. The radiators tick their dull morse. But here, on the saucer, the rind curls into the shape of a question no one has thought to ask the cold.

I eat the light one section at a time. It is sweeter than the orchard knew, sweeter for the distance, the bruise, the wait— the way some kindnesses arrive only after we have stopped expecting them.