Watermelon/Oranges

National/Global Poetry Writing Month, Day 6. I missed the point of the prompt--twice!--but poems are poems. I'll take them any way I can get them (within reason).

Watermelon painting by my youngest daughter; orange carnage from my family.

NaPoWriMo.net prompt #6: “Today’s prompt veers slightly away from our ekphrastic theme. To get started, pick a number between 1 and 10. Got your number? Okay! Now scroll down until you come to a chart. Find the row with your number. Then, write a poem describing the taste of the item in Column A, using the words that appear in that row in Column B and C. For bonus points, give your poem the title of the word that appears in Column A for your row, but don’t use that word in the poem itself.” To access the chart yourself, just click here.

Ha! Okay, I chose 7 and got the words “watermelon, splash, mocking.” All good. But then I forgot to reread the prompt that said to describe the TASTE using those words. Oops. I kindly gave myself another chance with the words “oranges, gurgle, irreverent.” Once again, there was no description of the taste of oranges. But I’m having a great time anyway.

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Watermelon

First there’s the thump parade at Costco, hefting up
and listening to their hearts tap. Then I study each

looking at the yellow spot and trying to remember
if that’s a good sign or not; the place where they rested,

a splash of striped green against hot earth, spines 
of vines curling around the dense ground. I can’t resist

knocking too many, until the slap sounds mocking,
the same in all of them, the deep murmur of fruition.

But they can’t all be good—or can they? In summer
an ovoid bigger than a newborn doesn’t last more

than a day or two, a pool of pale pink juice 
spreading as I cut, gnawed green rinds piling up.

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Oranges

These days, I buy them in eight-pound bags 
because my teenage son can eat three in a row:
always quartered, so the rind juts out of his mouth 
as he chews, showing off a marigold smile. 

I like to watch his preparations, from the clatter 
of the cutting board sliding from the shelf
to the black-handled knife lifted from the drawer
to the place he decides to set it all.

Sometimes it’s on the scarred kitchen island
dotted with Sharpie from bleeding art projects. 
Sometimes it’s on the counter facing the window
a slice of sun lighting his thatch of straw curls.

As he cuts I stay quiet, taking a break from trying
to chat about school or books or the pets. 
Those only elicit a “hmm” from him; 
he doesn’t want to talk unless it’s on his terms: 

questions about movies from the seventies, local news 
from his Sunday paper, irreverent cartoons that produce 
a gurgle of laughter. I take what I can get, segments 
of sweet time with him so thin
pith often veiling the flavor.