Alisha Acquaye is a Brooklyn bred writer and workshop bae who loves cartoons, music, and Afrofuturism. She has been published in Teen Vogue, Catapult, GQ, and more places. Alisha is currently writing her first book of essays.
Nonfiction winner of the 2020 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by guest judge Kendra Allen.
“Little juicy, how you do me. Made for eating, self consuming.”
- Princess Nokia, “Orange Blossom”
once upon a time I was struck by lightning / Oya has a funny way of telling you what to do / the electricity fertilized my mind seed / I figured I should take videos of myself in my underwear eating fruit / I thought it would be mad deep to confront the idea of being / sexualized and devoured / by paralleling my body with a jewel of the earth / and find femininity through ripeness / juice / I got the juice now / I got the ability to reincarnate / and emerge rock hard from below / I’m telling y’all that I will consume myself / before you have the chance / to pick me from a tree / isn’t cannibalism an act of self preservation / isn’t medicinal narcissism self care for Black women / when the world suffocates us / isn’t photosynthesis self care / aren't we using the sun to feed us more of our own brown / no, this is a thirst trap / my homegirl texted / I watch her bald head bobble / in my mind as she cocks it back in laughter / slender eyes squint into the charcoal cherries of her cheekbones / but what is fruit if not a thirst trap / if not an invitation to quench the raw screaming within us / if not a moment to placate something scathing and crispy / crawling paper thin down our throats / the body of fruit reminds me a lot of Black women / of myself / fleshy bleeding nectar that’ll bless your hunger / imperative / earth candy you can sink your fingers deep into / only with the permission of time / hard some days / soft when we wanna be / and always wanting water / always chasing dew / growing up walls and swaying from trees / dangling from branches like nature’s jewelry / why not celebrate us with a visual of me / enjoying our own flesh / show niggas how to eat us right / demonstate how to capture juices / before it escapes from the lips / let me take on this task of teacher / let me be a farmer / I water myself in oil marinated with lemongrass and lavender / the smoke of electricity still bouncing off my skin / I shoot the videos in the grass / on the balcony / Janet Jackson serenades me because I know better / I interrogate the camera with eyes oblivious to my sinful act / steal the belly of a golden nectarine with one swift bite / let her water fall from my jaw and land as a river on my thigh / I chew / contemplate her unfiltered texture and unabridged honesty / no additives / no high fructose corn syrup / no fillers / no words I can't pronounce meandering across the label / I remember for a hot second in my childhood that McDonald’s sold fruit with they Happy Meals / as if a few apple slices cancel out the white ooze inside chicken nuggets / as if a few apple slices cleanse the pesticides of capitalism / posing as salt crystals on french fries / for three million seconds I am a / Happy / Meal / swallow myself hole and spit my pit in your face / but it was a trap / cause when I post this later in my stories / tonight my crush / will reply to the video with / hey scholar / and maybe I’m not / but it’ll tickle something electric in my spine / the possibility that someone recognizes my sensuality and extraness for what it is / an act of intellectualizing myself / he is a just-sliced lemon at my lips / bittersweet juices burn and bless my throat / the jubilant yellow deceptive yet nurturing / daring to turn my whole self into lemonade
“Fertilizer! I’ll take bullshit if that’s all you got.”
- Frank Ocean, “Fertilizer”
there’s a family of fruit living in my abdomen / the story behind that is there’s too much estrogen or progesterone in my blood / says my gynecologist who is also a Black woman / leasing her tummy out to small tumors / the story behind that is maybe those handful of times I ate tofu / or that short phase I had with soy milk / did me dirty / or meat is pumped with hormones and that’s what fucked me up / the story behind that is I’m starting to believe being healthy is a myth and / that anything I put inside my body will eventually betray me / the story behind that is my body has been betrayed / I mean bitten into / I mean bitten in two / I mean there’s biters lurking all around / there are crimes within this figure I can map back to childhood / the story behind that is Black girls aren’t protected / but when we blossom into women we’re expected to protect everyone else / pollination failed us / the story behind that is my mother tried to plant me in her image / and my father don’t like the feminine soil she spread all over me / and my older brother was just as misguided as young Black boys were / the story behind that is the fruit / family lives in my womb / and turn on all the lights / and leave the faucet running / don’t ever pay rent / and flood me with traumas until the color of my blood turns rancid / the story behind that is there’s a domino effect of pain that whiteness and sexism fertilize through the family / it disguises itself as water swimming through our roots / dad passed it to mom / mom passed it to us kids / dad passed it to allofus / and allofthem passed it to me / the story behind that is pain stored too long crystallizes into boulders within the body / and the only way to get them out is to watch yourself fall / the story behind that is no one soothes the Black woman when she falls / down / she either self medicates / shields others / or swallows her sorrows until tomorrow morning / when the sun rises again / and the heat helps it / evaporate into oxygen for her lungs to wrestle with / the story behind that is there is no prescription for Black women / the story behind that is all the drugs we need are at home / the story behind that is love is a drug too / the story behind that is love is hella expensive / the story behind that is we didn’t have a lot of money growing up / the story is we still broke and broken / we still broke / and broken / we still / broke / and broken / we still don’t know / how to steal love and plant it / into our own garden
“Take me home. Let’s make real love.”
- Lianne La Havas, “Green Papaya”
back then we didn’t keep many fruits in our home / I remember red apples that weren’t delicious / pale yellow apples with round tops and small butts / amethyst grapes cloudy with grey yeast / the occasional bag of oranges / and my least favorite / bananas / I didn’t realize that I can’t stand raw bananas until / I planted my feet in Thailand / and tasted tiny bananas with round black seeds / I was twenty-three when I decided I don’t really fuck with them / and that just because something was always available at home / didn’t mean I had to carry it with me my whole life / in Thailand I met fruit that looked as if aliens planted them one day / when no one was looking / I’m talkmbout neon pink dragon fruit decorated with a dozen yellow wings / ready to take flight if you don’t pick it up from the market quickly enough / round ruby rambutan covered in sienna spikes / anxious to be cracked open and flaunt its jelly pearl / blonde starfruit risen from an intergalactic ocean / ready to be sliced into a handful of perfect stars / a constellation on your plate / curvaceous rose apple / who looks and tastes as romantic as she sounds / packed with crunchy ivory meat / burgundy mangosteen with organs arranged in the formation of garlic / and cherimoya / with an elegant reptilian complexion / and creamy insides that melt on your tongue into custard / I went to Mexico for my twenty-eighth personal new year / walked to the market and bought a whole bag of fruit / came back to my Airbnb with a dog named Lennon to match / laid the fruit on the window bench near my bed / and watched the rainbow bathe under the sun / the passion fruit called my name first / I cracked her open and was pleased to find a city of sparkling gold awaiting me / Brooklyn never had tropical fruit like this / but it harvested us into Black fruit that never ripens / we stay tough to the bite / inedible really / the most you can get out of us is a few drops of juice / and a spritz of perfume from our rinds / layers of impenetrable skin thickened by block parties / snowball fights outside our buildings / and gunshots ricocheting off sidewalks / in the middle of the night / like an Aunty spitting grape seeds into a bowl / I didn’t discover eating apples with natural peanut butter / the oily kind you have to stir before it touches your tongue / until I left the hood / I wonder what fruits await me back / home / in Ghana / I wonder how they will settle in my body / I wonder if my body will receive it / I wonder if my feet will know exactly where to plant itself / once I’m back on the continent
“Apples. Cherries. Pain. Breathe in. Breath out. Pain.”
- FKA twigs, “home with you”
the nurses ask how bad the pain is / it’s like my body relearns the definition of breathing / like wrestles with the concept of functioning after being sliced down the middle / like my mind is an archive of self histories and all the shit I have trouble letting go of / like the aftertaste of my favorite kiss / like the ghost of his fingertips at the stem of my neck / like her telling me our friendship was a burden / like the flashbacks of a body on top of me when I was too little to make a sound / like my dad’s scorching monologues flooding past the screen of my brain / like the emerald onyx showers of the Matrix / like my mom’s shadowed eyes at the end of a work week / like his fingers become a paintbrush and my hair the paint to draw pictures in the air / like I love the way she looks at me when she knows I’m listening to every word escaping her berry stained lips / like I didn’t mean for my surgery to occur at the same time the world is ending / like I didn’t mean for the nation to quarantine while I’m confined to this hospital bed / like bandages keep my intestines from spilling out / like I’m wrapped / like it's a wrap for me / a pear inside white fishnet foam / like I thought I’d be alone / like I been in this for over a year / like battling this illness / like my sacral chakra tossing my pain and trauma / like my body is a fruit salad / like my doc showed me the pictures after the carving was done / like I saw tumors masquerading as / plums / apricots / dates / and strawberries / like resting on a baby blue surgical towel / like posing for a picture looking all thick and alive / like a disgusting manifestation of all the shit I have trouble letting go of / like I’m sleepy and disoriented / like I text my friends pictures of / the picture of / the fruit bowl from my belly / like they look like chicken nuggets! / like I can’t believe those lived inside you! / like me either sis / like who knows how long they lived there / like if I could remove them myself I would’ve / like I fantasized about cutting through my own shell of skin / like bloodying my fingers with ironclad nectar / like to remove these alien fruit forms with my own hands / like hold them up to my face and curse them out / like stab them with a butter knife / like just to make sure they’re really dead / like you gotta double tap always / like I learned in the hundred zombie movies I seen / like you gotta kill the thing that dared come back to life / like the thing with a brain still beating / like the thing that threatened to devour you / like these fruit had a mind of their own / like they drank my blood / like they occupied in the pit / like grew in my womb / like they dragged me down to the pits of the earth / like all I was meant to do was soar / like closer to the sky mothers who conjured me / like my doc held my body in her hands / like guided my safe journey through levels of inferno and limbo / like I don’t even remember the moment I fell asleep / like the carving been happening for decades / like I wonder how deep they sliced before they hit the hard wall of seeds / woven like a tapestry below my flesh / like I wonder if a piece of fruit can survive without its core / like without something to tether itself to
“Time is of the mind. I can’t unlearn these forms.”
- Choker, “Guava Tea”
I mean I want to / live happily ever after / I wish I knew what happily ever after means / I mean I know what happy means / I mean I think I do / I mean I never met a happy person in my family / I mean real happy / happy like they know the truth about themselves and won’t change a thing / happy like they accept that they hurt people / and will be hurt by people / and won’t change a thing / because ever after means we’ll survive / after the fact / we’ll survive despite / we continue regardless / isn’t continuance enough to be happy about / my body continues after being bit in two / I wish my body knew how to respond to its own fables / my body is lighter now / after I was bitten open / and the bad seeds spit out / there is an after beyond the chewing / there is an ever even though / the space bitten meets oxygen / and browns itself into a new beginning / they call that enzymatic browning / when a piece of fruit exposed for too long / neglected for too long / denied complete consumption / becomes this smoky brown thing / I’m a smoky brown thing / the scar is so dark / like dirt readied for new crops / I stare at it every day / waiting for a stem to emerge / bearing new fruit / I stay scared I’ll be sick again / cause what if it’s not the body / but the blood / that got issues / there’s a Black woman with locs for days / like corn fields traveling down her back / who works at my favorite Trader Joe’s in the city / the one on 72nd off the two - three train stop / we get to talking from time to time / when the lines aren’t long or she’s working on the floor / I never eat the seeds in fruits and veggies / she says / not even zucchini, watermelon, and tomatoes / those seeds are edible / I ask / no I pick them all out / I make a face because that sounds like mad work / to pick apart the lifeline of everything you eat / remember that seeds eventually grow / she says / you eat a seed and that’s how things start growing inside you / I still don’t pick my fruit apart / I still do pick my lovers apart / my family is still torn apart / but I hold my ear close to their flesh / and listen intently to every lesson they want to tell me / before I devour them / and they disappear into my holy terrain
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