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CLASS PARTICIPATION
Well-scrubbed & shining under track lighting, we intellectual debutantes bejeweled office chairs that spun in a new media lab named for some So-and-So’s donations
Our presiding Media Crit & Theory professor was serving out some kind of career probation at a state school’s cheaper satellite campus He sat cross-legged, right of the lectern
Tossing aside his slim-fit blazer and tucking half his hairdo behind an ear, he asked us to call out luxury watch brands to casually illustrate some point
When the girls with the splendorous blond hair that gleamed like trophies called out words I’d never heard before, I knew the quagmire I fell into was deepening
BLOOD ORANGES
When splitting one down the middle for the first time, the sanguine reveal at first seems unnervingly wrong like a double-yolked egg’s novel horror before giving way to delight; coloring mom’s baking unnerving and strange
The crimson carpels and vesicles yield to the blade like a middle school dissection of atria & ventricles performed by a hand attached to a body whose own mutations were barely expounded upon in musty textbooks and handouts re-Xeroxed into a flaccid oblivion of hoses & cowheads
But, always the autodidact, you’d taste the segments on your own to discover that not all oranges were orange, that what seems wrong could be delicious that the blood was indeed the life and without care, it’ll all leave a stain
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Chris Middleman lives and writes in Seattle, Washington. A native of Downingtown, Pennsylvania, his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several independent press outlets, including New York Quarterly, Underground Voices and Full of Crow.