First Fruits

Pixie Bruner

First Fruits

The first in vivo Dreamfruit occurred ex nihilo
The labs could not figure them out.
Their chemistry too complex for chromatography,
the tearful botanists left apoplectic.
The first documented gardener was a woman named
“Chava,” no last name known.

They began to spread and appear in the wild,
spontaneously appearing in orchards,
upon trees in the Serengeti plains,
in the backyard gardens of grandmothers
aggressively segregating zucchini from acorn squashes.

The magic occurred at random.
but naïve stewards left them out too long,
not knowing when to harvest the strange hybrids.
They let them shatter and explode on the trellises and trees.

Neglect turned gardens into black mold and raw crude oil spills
terminal with millipedes, spiders, termites and snakes.
Vegetation rotted and increasingly saponified,
a miasma of cross-tempered cross-pollination.

Over millennia, genotyping proved Dreamfruit and
Nightmarefruit are the same species.

_______________

Pixie Bruner is a writer, editor, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and alien cats. Her collection The Body As Haunted was published 2024 on Authortunities Press. Her words are published/forthcoming in Space & Time Magazine, Crystal Lake Publishing, Star*Line, Sirens Call, Dreams & Nightmares, Punk Noir, and more. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Mea culpa! SFPA and HWA Member.

Author’s Notes and Backstory: This is one of my “Dreamfruit” poems. It’s a cycle of connected evolving cosmic produce poems dealing with human consciousness.” I accidentally created “Dreamfruit” in a poem and they’ve grown. They are the same as nightmare fruit, depending on where they enter consciousness. This is one of their origin poems. It is science meets myth and neither can come to answers. Chava is Hebrew for “Eve”- a legendary woman responsible for a garden and given too much blame for human curiosity and seeking knowledge to sate hunger. I’d eat from the tree if it existed. Pandora got the first packaged dreamfruit. Keep the packaging- it contains hope.

Editor’s Comments and Image Citations: It’s true that Eve gets the bum rap for being the deceiver of Adam, but it is very clear in Genesis 2 that he was with her in the middle of the garden when they partook of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The image chosen puts them both together with that shit-dumb look on their faces (Kar3nt/Pixabay) together with a filtered-enhanced anaconda (pngtree.com), and an apple-turned-rotten after the bite (vecteezy.com).