Apple-Picking
After Camille Pissarro

Each year Mama chooses a day
to pick apples, the day
when she doesn’t have to tug
to free one from its place.
That’s the day she climbs the tree
and shakes its branches
while I weave between bean poles,
turnips,
collards,
collecting the fallen fruit,
she doesn't mind if it is bruised
and shakes violently
but some always remain
attached to their boughs.

My cousin uses a long handled
picker to pluck those so when
my friends come over to play
the last apples won’t get trampled.

We place the fruit into bushel baskets.
When mine is full I choose a small apple
to eat. Inside it is white, and warm,
the juice sweet and sticky.

I only eat one knowing that tonight,
Mama will open the last jar
of jelly from last year,

the jelly she saved for us to spread
on slices of toast today
after we have picked the apples.

Birds of the Bagaduce
After Marsden Hartley

I often visit our favorite Hartley,
dream the largest boat is ours,
remember the first trip we took
on my twenty-eighth birthday.

While sweet smoke from your pipe
hovered around our shoulders
like a lacey shawl,

we listened for the water’s
gurgling, the humming
of dragon fly wings,
frogs croaking,

white bellied gulls
snatching smelts from the water,
snagging rides aboard Smith Cove-
bound boats.

The gallery owner
wants to make me a print,
ship it overnight in a tube.

She doesn’t understand,
it’s not the painting
I want to remember
while you are away.

Breach of Contract
After Dale Chihuly’s Blue Venetian with Green Calla Lily

Our contract says all life ends,
though the living don’t plan to honor
the agreement.

Antelope outrun cheetahs,
weeds become immune to herbicides,
roaches flee when overhead lights
switch on.

Humans allow machines to breathe for them
‘til tired lungs are rested,
holding to the world like
a blooming vine
coiled around its own urn¬––

Georgia Ann Banks-Martin
georgiabanksmartin@yahoo.com