pear

These last weeks, it’s been the pomegranate
stealing her attention with its circus of bright seeds.
She has made fancy drinks with it, crushed fistfuls
into a shaker glass, stained
the last millimeters of her fingernails.
Prayers have been made
in her midnight kitchen, tiny jewels
fed into the waiting mouth of a lover,
the counters flecked crimson,
summer swan-diving into autumn,
everything in her flayed open.

When she saw the pear,
she did not take it home thinking it would buy her
time, a better career, more money in the bank.
Though it would be easy to lavish praise
on that first bite, its tart smack against her teeth,
it was not a bible or soothsayer or a pile of stones
pointing northward.
She could extol its hippy silhouette on her windowsill,
but she did not imagine her reflection in its burnished frame.

Still, she could tell you something in her transfigured
before that particular section of the produce aisle,
how among the dalliances of citrus and artichoke,
the set stages of broccoli and purple cabbage,
the comic blunders of peas,
what she saw was an army
of mothers.