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The Yellow Watermelon
Your gasp cut through
kitchen summer air
as I pushed the knife blade
through the other side:
green-striped skin to green-
striped skin, the halves
pulling away, the ruptured
split to the unexpected-
you had only seen glossy
pink-red insides over
and over. Imagine waking
to a magenta sky or the grass
suddenly blue, the world
turned sideways. Your surprise
when the flesh presented itself
marigold, as if the sun itself
was buried in those emerald
walls, waiting for escape.
Will it taste the same?
Your mouth found flesh, bit
into delight condensed
in impossible fruit. The world
holding itself out to us, slice
after astonishing slice-
published in yourdailypoem.com
Corn
Once when I was five she offered
her teeth to me, her smile
a salmon, her bread-soft hands pointing,
laughing at the emptiness of a mouth,
then slid them back, delighted.
This is not her homeland. Her language
can't tell me the story of the teeth
or give them to me, can't pour grains
of them, like rice, shattering into a pot.
Those done bones, where did they go?
Now we walk in the whisper of corn
rowed in her back yard. She cradles
its fruit then yanks, quick, from the stalk,
peels the husk to small, compact kernels.
This is what she offers, not the wisdom
of words, but the care of growing
something that can nourish. Some thing
that starts underneath and rises,
blossoms, carries its seeds, is created
to be consumed. The sun slices through
those desiccated stalks, the sweet milk
strains underneath.
published in The Museum of Americana
Mangos
We buy mangos with expectations-
already taste the flower-sweet
juice on our tongues. Their green-
orange swirled skins speckled
from being Earth-bound, heavy
with juice, waiting, wind.
My husband takes the knife,
positions it off-center and glides
down each side, crisscrossing
steel through sugar, like a fish
through water. Then, folding
each side out, the yolk-gold
flesh arching, he releases it
into porcelain bowls. It's best
eaten like this, spoon and sunlight
in the early quiet of a new day,
the creamed coffee still steaming
from our cups, the blue
stretch of sky like a new skin,
ripe and waiting to be lived in-
published in New Limestone Review
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