I Saw My Dead Father in the Publix Produce Aisle

by Heidi VanderVelde

 

I saw you in the mound
of Michigan cherries,
each one’s burgundy skin
barely holding in beige flesh
like a girl wearing
a too tight dress
you would’ve eyed,
embarrassed me.

You gave Mom too many babies
for day trips to Traverse City anymore
so when I was 7
and bored of the babies’ cries too,
you took me to visit
your cherry mecca.

You told me to wait in the car,
pulled the grey Cadillac DeVille
onto a black dirt shoulder,
bought cherries at an unmanned roadside stand,
stuffed a 5-dollar bill into an honor box,
took a carton of the plumpest ones.

You rolled down your window,
spit pits into thawed honey green fields
that sucked up the seeds,
filled their summer bellies.
I imagined expectorated cherry trees,
limbs lowering with fruit.

You got sick
from eating too many,
reclined the soft leather driver’s seat
hand half on your swollen stomach
half in the waistband of your Levi’s
like you were about to give birth.

Thirty years later
I worried if given a cherry
you'd choke on the pit.

The sun-tanned forearm
that spanned the DeVille’s windowsill
turned the yellow of winter grass
then the gray of snow mixed with dirt
bones became weak stems
body a shriveled pit
and then you died
or didn’t die
maybe became something else
like a cherry pit
spat from a man’s mouth
landing in fertile dirt,
sprouting.

 

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