Ruby like half-life, spitting glittering radioactive waste at degenerate crows, ruby like godsend, like drinking blood for breakfast and smiling with all your teeth. Ruby like stained factory floor, thread of heritage, picking jewels from ash.
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I am hopeless for rubies. Dripping from the kitchen counter, tucked into couch cushions, sewn up my sleeves. I peel a banana, bite into cream-white, crack my tooth on red.
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In twenty years we will no longer have bananas, but I will live despite this. I will swallow my rubies and make myself a ruby-creature, hard and glistening and plentiful.
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What you picture when I say “ruby” might just be garnet. A false mirror. The eye can see to the very bottom of a garnet, the clearest part of a river. Diamond-like, watered-down cranberry, all its secrets lay bare. Pure, cowardly. There is no penetrating the depths of the dark and fathomless ruby.
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Ruby like war without end, like bitten tongue, like opera. Ruby like defeat, stringy and bitter, ruby like child with trumpet. Ruby like shrapnel, like edge of inferno, like propaganda, a stage.
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I like the red of it, crimson soaking into sand. I like the ocean turning ruby under pitted moon and biting down. It likes me back.
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Remember, I dug that ruby into your palm, blood matching stone, veined rose opening its petals to let me in. Ruby like the mouth on you, the deep bruise of it, the way I caught your ruby tongue and ripped it out just to see the red glowing in the moonlight.
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Even in the deadest of coal, ruby glimmers. Poke it with a stick and see the ruby snake writhe.
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