Stone Fruit
Missing
Transparent
The metal desk is rich with dings, hints of its many moves,
topped with a poor man’s shiny woodgrain laminate, rings weaving, showing its age.
The phone on the desk’s corner lights up, the same time each day, give or take --
today, the baby “ate all the breakfast – peaches and grits.”
A tilted, one-sided smile ticks up on her southern mama’s face,
the corner of her right eye wrinkles, showing her age.
Forty-three rings should adorn the finger where only two have rested.
Twelve rings between the first and this peaches and cream babe,
who, in the hour or so before daycare, had also eaten
applesauce, oatmeal, “just one or two” morsels of cat food, and yellow curry potatoes.
But it is the peaches with the grits that coax the smile. The sweetness
with the pluck. The fineness with the coarse. The dings with the rings.
Right now, my skin is on your skin,
where it belongs. I can forget how I missed you,
with a childlike intensity, the four days you left me,
and for months before. But missing doesn't matter in the morning,
when the sun has barely risen, and narrow streams of pale light
fall across your body and mine, filtered through
the crimped and crinkled blinds. Your skin, the color a young child
creates as her peach crayon glides over white,
mine the color the white crayon makes when scribbled over peach.
If I let myself think of anything other than peach and white
and skin and light, then I might have guessed that you
would leave again in four more days, and that before you did,
each preceding day would be pressed down hard,
until its formerly sharp point was dull and flat,
its protective cover peeled and tattered
that had just a few days ago proudly proclaimed,
with a childlike intensity, that it was to be
a most beautiful day, and so very full of color.
A new beginning was never my plan.
Though nature sometimes grants a second chance,
I need you to stop believing I can.
A jellyfish sinks back where it began,
multiple eyes cast a last upwards glance.
A new beginning was never my plan.
Its luminous form now somehow less than
before, next unspoiled life planned in advance.
I need you to stop believing I can.
Did the misshapen pearl leave an orphan?
Abandon her young to restart her dance?
A new beginning was never my plan.
Why choose this creature for the talisman?
Sprung of itself from its ritual trance.
I need you to stop believing I can.
And years after years her countless lives span,
see-through, spineless – by choice or happenstance?
A new beginning was never my plan.
I need you to stop believing. I can.
Erin Aube is a recovering attorney turned high school English teacher. Originally from a valley in Tennessee, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband, Charlie, daughters Zelda and Marigold, and too many cats to credit. Her work has appeared in Metonym Journal, Poetry South, The Emerson Review, Scapegoat Review, and Door Is a Jar.
