Imported: Fruit
by Eric Odynocki
After Jericho Brown
Time to buy fruit, a relishing plethora
That I weigh, inspect for spots, to tell what’s ripe.
Dad would complain, How can you tell what’s ripe?
Fruit aisles sit sterile, barren of fragrance.
He remembered streets laden with fragrance
Of peaches and cherries far from the market.
Why buy peaches and cherries from the market
when you could pluck a dew-dabbed apple
From the manse orchard? He’d duck, grab an apple,
Dodge the priest’s clenched hand, hop over the wall.
His childhood was clenched behind the Berlin Wall,
Spent without tasting a single banana.
In the US, he tasted a banana,
Relished, for the first time, plethora.
Eric Odynocki is a first-generation American writer whose parents come from Mexico and Ukraine. Eric’s work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and has appeared in Jabberwock Review, The Brooklyn Review, PANK, and elsewhere. When not teaching Spanish or Italian, Eric is an MFA student at Stony Brook Southampton.