Bodega | April Apples

A radio ghost stands on the invisible stage behind my refrigerator

and plays coy while I scrub turkey gravy out of the curve

of a spoon, saying of her husband of forty-one years,

We knew each other very well. I want to ask her: Are you holding

back wild thoughts like faulty parachutes or kissing

on the breastbone right in that juncture of rib and sternum like

you were trying to commune with the actual organ of love

or the bass-treble of two human sweat scents or dry heat and sand

near pyramids you summoned aliens to build, tomb for your love,

preserving it removing its brains and viscera with hooked instruments?

I want to ask myself what wild thoughts I have about my marriage.

The curve of the spoon is satisfyingly hard. The grime is gone in

a mum cloud. Spring is outside, bigger than this little house,

so we will be runaways soon and scale amazing trees near the

park as our children look for us and we will smash the apples on

our chests, breastbones singing under our fingers like the damp rims

of wineglasses and we will toss the cores into a love cairn as high as

an air traffic control tower, hopping trees and, eventually, planes

and whenever I am asked in forty-one years what our marriage was

I will say We knew each other very well, holding back the location of

us fugitives and our impossible April apples.

April Apples