Dean Browne

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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.

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DEAN BROWNE’s poems have recently appeared in Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, Poetry, and Southword.