I click my pencil.
Outside the classroom window,
lusty cicadas perform
their modulated song.
Their ancestors buckled
and unbuckled their tymbals
across the Roman bridge
before this town
became Salamanca.
Citrus trees cast shade
across stone courtyards.
The university’s libraries
hold books older than printing
presses, but it is under
fluorescent light
that I learn the words
for soulmate:
media naranja.
Rind stains my hands.
Pulp bursts when I split
the fruit—fibrous pith
sliding under my fingernails.
Not quite a Platonic
symmetry, but that evening
in an internet café,
filled with humming machines
and homesick foreigners,
I email my beloved. Longing
has stained orange
and sugared my fingers.
I tell her I miss
the points of her hips.
Angles of clavicles.
Nighttime grove of mouth.
Blossoming implicature
of tongue.
–
Ray Ball is a history professor, a poetry editor at Coffin Bell, and the author of Tithe of Salt (Louisiana Literature, 2019) and Lararium (Variant Lit, 2020). Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net and have appeared in numerous journals, including descant, Glass, and Waccamaw.