They sag in just the way I remember, clotting against each other in nests of purple and gold, skins thinning and flesh softening in cracks of sidewalk concrete.  As a child I used to eat them off a tree at the edge of a cotton field, loving them more than wild plums but not as much as blackberries. Their feral sweetness in my throat tickled with its hint of something gone to ruin, something almost too wild to be with. Only once I picked them before they’d ripened, the blister of their greenness sending me home for water in a hurry, my mouth full of trickery and insolence. Some years later I made some jam with them. It sat on my shelf in jars until someone insisted I spread it on toast, and I did. My teeth missed the skins and the nudge of the pit. Wasps still crawl inside their golden hearts, I notice now, intoxicated with loamy fruitflesh and the heady disappearing nourishment of summer.

©Laura Sorrells 2007--2012

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Newborn

It’s haphazard and I don’t like it, this way I have, when I’m living alone, of collapsing into self-neglect when it comes to how and what I eat. I know better. Rice cakes broken in half like sacramental wafers and nibbled as I sweep or read. Peanut butter slathered loosely on heels of whole wheat loaf bread. I’m not down to Sunbeam yet but maybe getting there. Lots of coffee. The French press is working overtime. I unwittingly bought a pound of decaf Sumatra the other day and buzzed around organizing my shelves and folding clothes until I happened to notice there was nothing behind the imagined push I felt from the beans. Diet soda, once my sworn enemy, crowds my refrigerator shelves in half-full bottles that I’ll empty and recycle soon. Some days I don’t eat till evening, eschewing the corn dogs and cardboard pizza triangles the school cafeteria offers. Other days I go ahead and dance with the devil and I always regret it: flavorless chicken sandwiches that would make Thich Naht Hanh shudder and throw up his patient hands, wilted huddles of what passes for salad, and the inevitable applesauce. Nowadays I don’t even boil water for oatmeal, much less sit down at my dining room table to eat it slow with raisins and honey like I used to. I deserve some homemade guacamole, an organic spinach salad nurtured with the sweetest flakes of carrot you can think of, and fresh crusty French bread dipped in EVOO. I need some green tea, the kind flavored with rose petals, or maybe some pomegranate juice, pure and expensive. Bring me something clean and wild, something delicate, something strong. Hurry it onto the plate, into my glass, and sit me down in front of it. light me a candle and tell me something about the sky. Hold my hand and break bread with me, and slow me down when I chew too fast. Remind me to hear the way I taste my food and to smell the colors as if they were newborn: fragile, wet, and hooked by the miracle of how to swallow.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved