Mango Tale of New York

You might, one night, find yourself buying a mango outside a bodega in the West Village after a long night spent listening to music with a pianist, in the basement of a bring-your-own bottle jazz club.

Perhaps it is almost dawn, and your favorite food in the world is a mango, and the pianist has never had one.

You stand over the bin outside the door and you can smell them, these yellow ones come from Haiti and they are the sweetest, best mangoes you will ever taste but you don’t know that yet.

You buy one then, and when he asks you how you’ll eat it, you pull a Swiss Army knife out of your pocket, because that is the kind of girl you are.

The flesh feels like flesh under your fingers, like intimate flesh. This is no platonic fruit, this is Eve’s temptation, Snow White’s little death.

You are both all slippery fingers and mouths now, and there is no difference between kissing and not kissing,

when everything tastes like mango.

Tags: jazz, mangoes, nyc, prose poem, summer