Roshan Zoe Moazed: The Creation of a Solar System
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Grapefruit
When my mother got pregnant with me she started craving grapefruit, my father bringing her paper bags swollen with citrus from the grocery store, the bottoms sagging so that for a moment he was worried the grapefruits would fall through to the floor and keep going, dissolving beneath the surface of the Earth, plowing through plate tectonics it’s a theory, plunging to the sun soul sparkling golden, on fire beneath planet crust like fish scales swimming in fishbowls, trapped inside miniature oceans where filters sing lullabies like mermaids, luring sailors to sleep. But it’s impossible, waxy peels protecting grapefruits like an organ inside a skull, writing thoughts and scribbling them on the backs of eyeballs that blink in their sockets, processing data in the produce aisle, placing planets and peppers into plastic and carrying them home for wives craving the creation of a solar system, embryos growing cells that multiply by mitosis, nuclei filling the uterus swollen like paper bags from the grocery store, stuffed with grapefruits plucked from branches, dipped in pools of wax that make them glitter like suns that might have been ours, if it were different, I’ll always wish, citrus stars flickering through my telescope like candles painting shadows on the wallpaper. They’re centers of their own in a blackness, dragging brain tissue into whirlpools, revolving around something extraterrestrial, am I, skin cells accumulating onto a fetus dreaming, of an exit, writing prose onto paper and the retina, telling stories that don’t exist yet but they could. Solar systems sliding through the cervix, into hospitals and the universe, there’s room for infinity inside the infinite, citrus stars colliding, splitting particles that fuse to form a planet, published in textbooks it’s a theory, plunging to libraries of the sun soul, sparkling golden, fish scales floating belly up in fresh water, trapped at the center of the Earth, melting into magma, lullabies luring the wakeful to sleep. My mother craved grapefruit stars in the nighttime, slivers of something sour, each lip a ruby pursed at sunset, glowing like goldfish shrouded by algae, specks shining through the cervix, yanked from the uterus where I was napping, parents have a gravitational pull and I learned this. Particles laced to make a baby in a solar system of their own, outside the Milky Way, exposed to nebulas colored on the computer, nothing gray is beautiful, citrus stars twinkling in a telescope, they could be mine if it was different but it’s not. My feet are on soil packed for miles, dipping to the center of the planet but not the universe it’s what I wanted or did she, peeling back fruit and throwing skin in the garbage, bursting juice pustules with her tongue, sweet and acidic like babies that are a blackness, dragging mothers into a whirlpool, revolving around something extraterrestrial, golden plastic from the produce aisle, plunged through wax pools and preserved.
Roshan Zoe Moazed’s previous publications include "Gnome-y" in Prometheus Dreaming (July 2019), "Soul" and "Tangerines in Tucson" in Sleet Magazine (June 2018), and "Kicking Hard in College" in Stylus (May 2014).
