your breath catches at the cleft

between your laugh and the mutter of the word

        lon-gan

        crawls up your throat to come out a whisper,

        a fragment of a prayer.

did you catch that? 

your momentary delay of the word: 

an idle attempt at lulling time.

there again,

as you took the fruit into your hands

rolling the small orb––the color of unpolished topaz––

around the path of your palm

with your left index finger leading:

you falter,

rolling it back again counterclockwise,

                             clockwise,

                             counterclockwise,

even as the indents remain the same, 

each time piercing the raw skin of your newly ruptured blister.

could you feel that? 

the wrinkled shell of the fruit scraping at the same spot, 

until bruises began to forge beneath your flesh.

you say it once more, longan,

before questioning the broken stem,

and deciding to leave it a question,

as you watch the skin part beneath the pad of your thumb.

did you listen to the crack it made as it split? 

as if fruit could sigh,

as though cracking were birth.