She wants a persimmon. All she has in the fridge are bruised apples with no way to sass her way into orange flesh, peeling skin, her tongue tickled & tarted. She wants to be free of how basic she’s become, like a kiss that won’t land. There have been tears, a mélange of salt & bitters & old skin cells. She rummages through a closet dense with dross looking for God-knows-what when she finds the binoculars her sister gifted. This is how we keep going, isn’t it? A shift. A grace. As if a small animal appears & pulls us from our knees. And now she stumbles to the window, lenses up, espies a throng of orange-crowned warblers heading to her tree, her limbs dancing, her leaves all in one swoop whispering the wind, again. Through no agency of her own, as if abracadabra, persimmons in the fridge, sad apples now a buttered tart. One minute the tedium waxes catastrophic, the next she throws open the door, hears the screen slam behind her, the creak of rotting wood, rusted nails. Now she’s on the side of the highway, her thumb out, her cowboy boots, her red crinoline skirt. But this is a metaphor; she stopped wearing cowboy boots years ago.