Red Delicious
I used to eat
her keen sight
and its laser
serrations
surgical rotations
undressing
bone-white
in clockwise
countdown
around a
prenatal core
its cyanide
unborn
this unsung
artist carving
her curving
relief as if
by a craving
of curvature
itself for
conclusion:
or else
of some
rondure
so sheer
as to molt
its skin
of matter
turn after
turn on
the unseen
potter’s lathe
of unmaking:
thumb-spun
by a suddenly
unknowable Eve
who might soon
no longer
deign to
receive
the name
Mother
Copyright © 2022 by Jerome Ellison Murphy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.