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JSAbsher |
Poetry |
© 2005 JS Absher • All Rights Reserved |
Eating Apples The thing I need is last year's apple in a dark corner of the apple house-- brown with liver spots, soft like a new born's head. When I was 9, Daddy gave me one, vinegary sweet, earthy as a potato. That year, too, in a basket on Aunt Ruth's lustrous dark table, while everyone else's eyes were turned to the new bought color of the tv, an apple's maroon deepened in the dusk into purples never seen on any other. I tried it with my teeth, they skidded across the wax. Any good? asked Daddy, before I could hide it. Ruth was fighting Aunt Helen over the fruit in their baskets. Mine, said Ruth,was the size of an grapefruit. But Helen, spreading her fingers to shape a sphere, said, Mine was big as a canteloupe, biggest growth the doctor ever seen. That year Ray took Helen down Topia Road to a tar-paper shack, in its yard a spindly old tree she liked the flavor of, backed his pickup against the trunk, and gearing back and forth rocked and shook the tree till it rained Virginia Beauties. It'll ruin half, said Helen. Don't eat that half, said Ray. Later still I'd watch Daddy eating the hardest red apples Mama could buy, the crunch of teeth in the white flesh drowning the voices that filled his head with sauce. His eyes were dead with the drugs or the depression-- I wondered if it made a difference-- but his mouth opening wide to take those enormous bites was wet and pink as a baby's. Ship of Fools, Winter 2005 |