Fruit is the thing with innocence—
so it’s odd that we call it flesh.
Holding with hands—omnipotence—
children of farmers away from the thresh
fields where peaches fall ripe,
splitting open on earth,
furred skin bursting, a type
of sacrificial sickly yellow birth.
An offering to the children,
ten and wild and hungry
scampering through sylvan
glades and finding a fruit tree.
Shaking it, climbing it, picking it clean,
fulfilling a destiny of propagation,
lips dripping with juice, ten and mean,
they gain a rural girl’s education.
What they find as their prize
gives up freely as benefit
that paradox. With bruised fist, the girl pries
it open with a rusty knife. Whether it
is violent or not, she spills
out the seeds on soft August clod.
She runs back over foothills,
sated and finding herself a god.
And when sticky blood runs down
to percolate through dirt and worms,
we find the girls, ten and bound
to instinct and all of nature’s terms.