Red Delicious
I used to eat
her keen sight
and its laser
serrations
surgical rotations
undressing
bone-white
in clockwise
countdown
around a
prenatal core
its cyanide
unborn
this unsung
artist carving
her curving
relief as if
by a craving
of curvature
itself for
conclusion:
or else
of some
rondure
so sheer
as to molt
its skin
of matter
turn after
turn on
the unseen
potter’s lathe
of unmaking:
thumb-spun
by a suddenly
unknowable Eve
who might soon
no longer
deign to
receive
the name
Mother
Copyright © 2022 by Jerome Ellison Murphy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Our adult guardians are the first deities we encounter. There’s an uncanniness to their environmental agency, and to their skills that seem, in early life, beyond our own capacity. Here, as in the poem ‘Our Mothers’ Hands,’ I write about refractions of identity visible in a simple physical act, peeling an apple with hypnotic precision, which occurs somewhere along a spectrum of creative and destructive impulse. Witnessing the mother both making and unmaking, the child suddenly questions their own centrality. It turns out motherhood is only one aspect of this creative self—and how nurturing, how safe, is any artist, at heart?”
—Jerome Ellison Murphy
Jerome Ellison Murphy
