Dean Browne
The Pineapple Massage
after ‘ASMR Binaural Pineapple Relaxation’, Ephemeral Rift
This YouTube video of a guy massaging a bespectacled pineapple
with jokeshop nose, brushing its spiny leaves and knocking hello
hello tension hello recurrent twinge in the joint outcha come –
he whispers nothings to the fruit, whose day has been so long.
I’ve never seen food used like this and the algorithm knows it –
the dry leaves crickle, he can feel doors opening in the rind
and it’s as if I have slipped through one and listen from inside.
I am alone. Oh, I might have laughed at this before:
somewhere there is a man who comforts the people by means
of a pineapple. He schools the ear in his curriculum of touch.
Yeah, even when he produces that big kitchen knife and carves
past the leafy plume to consume his client chunk by chunk –
the blade that sinks inches from my ear, so the air brightens
yellow with the summer pent inside and is palpable.
DEAN BROWNE’s poems have recently appeared in Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, Poetry, and Southword.