for Justin Phillip Reed

My neighbor harvested a solitary lemon from the potted Meyer lemon tree on his balcony. This I watched from my window. The lemon was not quite ripe; my neighbor twisted it, round and round, at the base of the stem before the fruit gave way. The Meyer tree still swayed from the harvest when my neighbor held his lemon to the light—as though to look through it or perhaps to eclipse the sun, which illuminated his balcony and cast my window in shadow. For this reason, my neighbor didn't see me—just as he hadn't seen me that entire summer while I watched his little lemon grow. I don't know: something about trying to distract myself from the other objects I owned but was still wanting of. I was living a whole life at the window, wanting of that life despite having it, and despite intuiting love in my present, my future—expecting the unknown faces of many people for whom I would soon grow deep affection. Alas, the neighbor returned inside with his lemon. Crossing the threshold, he palmed the lemon like he might an egg. It should be said, I suppose, that my neighbor's wife was dying. I'd greeted her on a few occasions by the shared dumpster, but as for this man—her husband—I never met him at all. The nurses came and went, the ambulances. I'm not sure. I'm not sure because I moved to a new city. What I mean is, I was in love, and it was time for me to feel like I was living in the buildings I was living in: a basic human right—to look around and think, Everything here could be cherished or buried or stolen, and right now it is known, I know it, and none of it is mine.


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Erinrose Mager's prose appears in Fence, DIAGRAM, Passages North, New South and others. She's the co-editor of THE OFFICIAL CATALOG OF THE LIBRARY OF POTENTIAL LITERATURE. She's living in Denver.

Read her postcard.

Detail of art on main page by Susan Murtaugh.

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