Buying a Half-Bushel
By Roey Leonardi
Because the man at the fruit stand knows Mama from a lifetime ago, he fetches her a basket fresh off the tractor’s back. Leaving the orchard, she tells me what the trees have seen. The spring before she arrived, one Skinner boy shot the other through a clearing in their boughs which at that time of year were blossom-blushed such that when buckshot rang through the boy it dotted the peach petals with scarlet not unlike the mark on a dogwood flower which my grandmama says is a kind of stigmata, though she wouldn’t put it like that, too lofty a word for a thing as solid as faith, or a tree. Why? I ask Mama and she looks at me the way Grandmama looks at her new husband when he asks if Carolina wrens live round these parts, bewildered, as if to say, Don’t you know where you are? Here where cousin Dewey killed a man in a bar fight with a single punch. Here where Mama’s junior prom date died at age sixteen beneath a tractor wheel. Here where grandmama divided the serpent’s head from its spine with the blade of her gardening hoe. Here where something was done to Aunt Lorraine that she won’t speak of, even now, except to say the body remembers what the mind lets go. Here where everything and nothing grows. Land of red clay, kudzu, whitetail, lightning bug. Mama says due to development the orchard gets smaller each year. We cling to the earth’s jaw even as it yawns shut, knowing all the same that we will be undone. We were born with a taste for undoing.
Roey Leonardi is a poet and writer from South Carolina. She is currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Bat City Review, Epiphany, The Harvard Advocate, and Pleiades.
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I love this difficult and beautiful poem.
Oh my goodness. What a poem.