Chayote
by Rhodora Peñaranda

Dancing green round the crater’s rim, jumbled
like a gnome in a basket, its wrinkled
face packs a nutty pulp of tales to tell
inside its thin, spotted skin. But I’m a fool

who forgets; when I finally noticed it — bruised,
forgotten, cold-dry in the vegetable bin, its tight
pucker, like Mrs. Tran’s, bowed like a parrot—
who said Eve crunched a lemon and so cast our sour lot!

When last I saw her, her youngest daughter had left;
like all the rest, she remembers her less and less.
The older I get, the less wise I seem to become—
she said, finally. And then the words would not come.

How memory now turns inside the miser’s veins, flattening
the pip under coarsening rind; tired mouth, clenching.

© Rhodora Peñaranda

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