Oranges were charged this morning. Last night I read

a famous poem about oranges and this morning you shrugged

a cluster of them over your shoulder

as if they were a sack of gifts or coal burning

through their netted bag as the orange in the poet’s hand

did at the end of the famous orange poem. Yesterday too

I ate oranges in bed.

Over your shoulder the oranges went while

you insisted they be my contribution

to Naughty Santa at a Christmas Party

I was planning to attend with many guests

I’d never met and worried would be lawyerly

types which S misheard as loyally types

thinking I was anxious over how fiercely

they may defend one another

and not how they may scorn, prosecute or delight in

my bag of oranges which, in writing this, I will now

have to bring to the game and perhaps,

after a series of swaps and steals

land the oranges in their rightful lap,

have to justify why a bag of them is

incalculably valuable, how they glow

in poems and on the tree in my yard

which I’m very far away from now,

meaning they glow in the mind also,

how they can be juiced or cut into wedges that fit along

the teeth once the flesh is bitten out,

how they can be tossed

in salad, gorged on at half-time or sizzle

into perfume when the oily skin is condemned

to fire, how in the famous poem

the poet even makes up for the disparity

in the change they are carrying and the price

of a chocolate bar they want to buy

for their girlfriend with an orange, how

he pays with an orange, which is not to demean the gift

of oranges by suggesting they are valuable because

they can be used as currency since oranges

are only ever born

not asked into that cruel ordering

of the world, how there is a video of Louise

Bourgeois peeling an orange while reciting

a story about her father

who made a cruel joke by telling dinner guests he would

produce a portrait of his daughter from an orange

and proceeded to cut a figure from the peel, carefully aligning the genitals

with the hard bark-like nub where the orange was once attached

to its tree, a belly-button of a kind, scarred connection to another

life, which, when inverted, protrudes in a series of woven white

fibres the same substance as the white fibres

surrounding the peeled fruit, so that when he flipped

his cutout, which he gendered a woman by its lack

of any protrusion, the effigy bore a large erection, how Louise

cooly dismisses her father, his crassness, how the peel she cut

in the video to demonstrate his party trick is now under glass

dry, curling and brownish,

its female body, according to him, facing out to the world,

how we decided to drop roughly skinned orange halves

in a blender making a thick orange mash we poured

through a sieve into glasses while your daughter, my friend,

scooped the pulp into her mouth,

how all our hands were sticky

and the water we washed them in was warm, how my colleague

at a high school where we worked as caretakers

would peel an orange every morning on our break

with a small knife into a perfect unbroken spiral

and every day our friend who worked there also would attempt

the same spiral and never achieve it, how we knew it

to be a skill made all the more wondrous by our clumsiness

or ineptitude or lack of practice, how in one telling

it’s a complicated way of peeling

an orange and in another it’s the story of a life,

how whenever you moved you were moved by others, manoeuvred

until you resembled something unbelievable, a spiral hewn

from a sphere, how it was, at times, sweet,

aromatic and bright, bright, bright.