[To put a plastic bag over bananas reminds me]
Isaac Salazar
roof top
Christen Noel Kauffman
To put a plastic bag over bananas reminds me
of the time my brother suffocated me. First,
with a plastic bag, the grocery kind, that used
to say THANK YOU in red block letters,
then his pillowcase that smelled like semen &
diseased summer, then a thin t-shirt with a hole bored
through it as if some punctual insect had eaten
an exit before the body even arrived. I remember
how the air became expensive. How my brother
looked almost rational about it, experimenting
with breath & fabric, the way a boy studies
the anatomy of a dinosaur or the physics of a rifle.
Bananas ripen fastest when trapped together in plastic.
How strange that sweetness is accelerated by a little less world.
Isaac Salazar is an Austin-born and Houston-based poet. A winner of the 2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize, his work has been recognized by the Western Literature Association and Brooklyn Poets. His poems have been published in AGNI, Bear Review, Hayden's Ferry, Honey Literary, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. He is a graduate student at Rice University. Find Isaac on Instagram.
Christen Noel Kauffman is author of The Science of Things We Can Believe which won the 2023 Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Notes to a Mother God (2021). She is a 2022 National Poetry Series finalist. Her work can be found in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Find Christen on Instagram and BlueSky.