Trending »
Related »

Woman At A Fruit Stand – Sarah Trudgeon

on January 4 | in Poetry | by | with No Comments

 
      The gew-gaws of false amber and false turquoise attract them.
      “Like to like nature”: these agglutinous yellows!—Ezra Pound, from “Women Before A Shop.”

 

Oh, yes, I have apples, but you look like someone with the
finest taste: come in back and try my more tropical gew-gaws:
guanabana better than pina-colada, my guava, my bunch
of Praying Hands bananas, clasped in desire, one false
prophet in each divine finger. Come in here! Scrape the amber
flesh from my mango skin with your spoiled teeth
and pluck sweet floral lychee and rambutan eyeballs from their false-
eyelashed, raspberry shells. Peel back the leathery, turquoise
hide of my custard apples, smartly designed to attract
specifically you. And suck the seeds smooth before spitting them
out! Halve the big brown teardrop of my mamey; finger its flesh
like a goblet of baby-food, apricot-marzipan custard of youth. You want to.
Nibble gently, at last, my sunny canistel, the texture
like egg yolk, the taste like vanilla, but also like nothing else in nature,
like you, like me. Stranger than fiction, more like tumors or monsters—these
rot-stinking jackfruits, I mean. Our insides are all just the little agglutinous
hearts of nature: synesthetic, bruised and light-bright yellows.

 

headshot, sarah trudgeon_sSarah Trudgeon’s poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books, Iron Horse Literary Review, Sewanee Theological Review, Smartish Pace, and The TLS, and is forthcoming from The Nation. Her reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review. She was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2013 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She teaches part-time at the University of Miami.

Pin It

Related Posts

« »

Recent Posts

News

THE SACRED GROVE –  [...]

[new_royalslider id="17"] Ana Flores is a sculptor and ecologist. Her work is informed by how pla

Safia Elhilo

2 Poems

Michele Robinson\'s Art [...]

Let Me Straddle Your Mind

X.J. Kennedy

The Crusader

Why did you leave bring m [...]

Yeah bring our electric shaver back, I bought it we shaved each others back it was important to me

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes

BEFORE YOU – Kwame  [...]

1 Yes, we were country, lived in shotgun shacks, where the road loses its way to dirt and live

MENSTRUAL FLOWERS – [...]

[new_royalslider id="11"] Courtesy of the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery  

WHAT THE WOMB ISN’T [...]

         "Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to lea

JUNOT DIAZ

Junot' Diaz and Edison, NJ

EDISON, NEW JERSEY – [...]

The first time we try to deliver the Gold Crown the lights are on in the house but no on

Rachel Eliza Griffiths [...]

Elegy & Poem

The March on Washington:  [...]

OTHER WORLD: A Conversati [...]

"We are all the other."

I OPEN A BOX

…and find inside a picture, of myself as a child, sitting on a small chair, wearing overalls an

Naive Paintings

Raphael Perez

CIRCLES OF THE MOON & [...]

To Alex, on turning two Some say the Ring of Brogar is the Circle of the Moon. There is n

In This Issue

March on Washington An Interview with Cheryl Evans

5 POINTZ: GRAFFITI MECCA  [...]

In a strange twist of what seemed like reverse vandalism, the Graffiti Mecca was painted over.

In This Issue

Forest Gander A Translation

In This Issue

Quassan Castro, poem Grandson to Grandmother

URBAN CANVAS: Wynwood Wal [...]

Wynwood Walls, of Miami has been called "a Museum of the Streets."

Pulaski Skyway

Low like the mean dream of Newark the sky must have seemed to its builders. Rickety now, unhingin

THE SPAN & OTHER POE [...]

At last, the extremes of his present methods seemed to offer the happiest avenues. The strengthe

Paul Latorre

5th Limb Poems

Joan Larkin

Poem, Knot

Gina Loring, Def Poetry [...]

Poem, Look This Way

In This Issue

Xue Du, Poem

AT THE END OF THE DREAM I [...]

A woman      in a black kimono      dyed black hair disappeared      behind a black curtai

Marge Piercy

Poem: Behind the War On Women

Naive Paintings

Raphael Perez

Marie Miazziotti -Gillam [...]

Maria Mizzotti-Gillan

Vicky Dantel

Short Story

In This Issue

Pilar Fraile Amador poem

Quassan Castro

Poem

Lugensky Durosier [...]

Lady Haiti

In This Issue

David Trinidad

In This Issue

Landzy Theodore

In This Issue

Angelo Nikolopoulos

Scroll to top