Heavy for April, you said as drops mottled your loved and dusty thighs where I pillowed. From the cherry orchard where once we bark-carved our still unlinked initials, we watched them loom and bruise the horizon.
Clouds.
Clouds that showered our town with seasons of Caesium-137. A storm’s coming, you said, let’s go to bed and all night the doomed and thirsty nightingales sang the lightning silent as the rain swelled our cherries contamination-tight. A voice distilled from shrill rumour and static announced on Radio Free Europe the wind-gift from the forests of Chernobyl to the people of the plains, and pronounced our cherries untouchable. Strange danger for a Sunday, you whispered close your eyes before you kissed me.
The cherries fell singly at first.
Too heavy for tender stems,
they fell in pairs.
Then every unpicked twig was shedding glossy drops into the street. Liver-dark flesh, split skins and juice pulped the dry mud bloody where we walked. We measured our blessings in becquerels, Geiger crackle and dead wasps.
We ate the cherries anyway, you and I, because we were incandescent with youth and age was still a half-life away. But we decay. Slipping. Fruited flesh to sun-shrivelled stones.
Now drugs etch a spectral negative of cherry branches in tissue through my veins. Close your eyes.
Your isotope still nightingales my dark orchard and the cherries, singly and then in pairs, are dividing and dividing from my core.
They must burn their way out.
DoubleSpeak 