Peaches, by Allison Churches

Cold misty air mixes with pinecones on blue concrete

and the smell of last night’s rain seeps out of damp wood.

I’m sitting on the porch with a peach. My teeth pierce

its skin and squelch through the salmon-colored flesh.

Bare feet pressed against that blue concrete now,

a squirrel runs up a tree and the peach is in my mouth again.

This morning rolls down the mountains to me and the sun

hides behind white-gray clouds who had shed their tears a few hours before

I came out here and closed the screen door. I take another bite.

My heels are brushed by pine needles and the sorrowful puddles

that I wander through carelessly. The peach hard in my hand,

its pulp is wedged between my two front teeth, and the sweetness of it

blends in my mouth with the wet of the dew.

In the house, up the carpeted stairs, and through

the hallway filled with whispers spoken by family I’ve never met,

my sister stirs in her sleep. A quilt is wrapped around her;

she sleeps on her stomach and will not wake for several hours.

A chill surrounds me; the cold never seems to leave this place.

Not even when the sun peers between trees and birds, a feeble attempt

at warming us. I, like that sun, peer down the blue concrete road.

There is a lake at the end of it. I imagine that lake,  fragments of the

crystal water glimmering in the light of the morning sun. Later today,

children and their mothers will crowd on the shore of that lake, in spite

of the cold. The velvet peach skin finds its way to my lips again.