her last supper / my first bite

Actually, when I was

born, my parents lived in a small house:

cheap enough for the size and the way the cars

drove by like stormchasers, but

even that didn't matter. The yard out back had

fruit trees. Not many. At least one apple. This

glittering fact lives in my memory like a

half-raveled string

in my pocket: unobtrusive, forgotten,

just sitting quietly tangled until my mother

kicks it up. We are in her room,

losing time to shadows and disease,

my attempts to hold her here boiled down to

nothing more than a spoon and a jar

of my own applesauce. I have no fruit trees. My sauce is only

passable only when cooked down to a

quart of toothless mush, the store's dregs, the mealy

runts of autumn.

Still, she eats it, rattles the spoon past her

teeth, and the string in my pocket

unravels, reveals itself a golden thread, a

velvet, honeyed link from her

wet tongue turned

xeric - she did this once, for me. Made sauce from that

yard's tree. My first food. Her last: apples, honey, orange

zest and time.