"Juice" by Jesse Sensibar

Juice

The dawn breaks bloody orange and pink like a pale mist in the blue like the oranges I squeeze by hand with my hands in the sink into a glass measuring cup. I don’t own a juicer, try not to make a production out of this, these two or three oranges I squeeze some mornings before I go walking at Buffalo Park. I skim the seeds of the orange juice off the surface with a battered almost-flat dope-shooting teaspoon. This measured cup of juice is supposed to be good for me and helps me not worry that I don’t get enough fruits and vegetables, always my worry. It’s also a sign, all those years of insulin-dependent type-two diabetes, jabbing a needle into my stomach or thigh every morning, a part of the American obesity wave and somehow it’s a testament to rolling out the other side of all that at only two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. I can drink juice. I don’t have to worry about the sugar spike. It’s good got at me again. Years of no fruit juice, diabetes gone, and I never lost a limb or an eye to that or the meth or the road except once, almost, my favorite left foot crushed under a truck on top of a truck. But now I can drink a single cup of fresh-squeezed by my own hand any morning I wish, and so sometimes like Mother’s Day, Sunday, today, that’s just what I do.

Jesse Sensibar

Jesse Sensibar’s work has appeared in such places as The Tishman Review, Stoneboat Journal, and Waxwing. Jesse's first full-length work, Blood in the Asphalt, is forthcoming from Tolsun Books. You can find him at jessesensibar.com.

Photo Credit: Staff