The Bluestone Review Spring 2022

Cranberry By Alysia Marie Townsley There is bitter fruit and i eat it. tasteless. perhaps the bitterness was never there, perhaps the bitterness was always there, never disappearing, seedless. You have seeds. they grow in you like intruders, whispering you could be like that. you could be heartless. You can have your cake and eat it too, you can have your Nothingness, you can have the sky and paint it black, you can have this and the world and the next world and (Bitter) seeds that grow like flowers, not weeds—you wouldn’t want a weed. you could treasure the fact that it grows but not the weed, you could nurture it until it blooms but not the weed, only the stem, only the breaking of solid ground, you could Have the (bitter) world, you can Have your (bitter) cake and eat it too, you can scream and hear it in a vacuum, you could die and die and die and (Bitter) Have your cherries. make them sugar sweet and then spit them out onto the clean white countertop. dip your fingers with sugar then blow it across the room like confetti. bake cookies, bake cakes, eat fruit, eat nothing, gag, repeat and repeat and repeat. call it (bitter) sweet, call it your favorite flavor, say i am (bitter) better every day. gag. repeat. you can have

you can have you can have you can have your sadness. that is tasteless too.

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