Linda Curtis Meyers


The Apple Eater

(for my mother)

My sister and I used to tease her
about the cores.
Away at school, we thought
our rooms should wait for us:
sunlight alone on the bed, dust
hovering in warm air. Somewhere
in the recesses of her day--
the cleaning done, dinner
a distant thought--she'd open
one of our doors, an apple
in one hand, a book
in the other. I don't know how
she chose the room. Perhaps
she followed the sun's movement
across the house, as it visited
each scene with an hour of intensity.
I see her against a pillow, hear
the snap of winesap, the soft flutter
of pages. While we were gone
she read all of Fitzgerald and Hemingway,
most of Faulkner. I'd come home
to a slightly rumpled bed, a brown gift
on the headboard. She'd left
in a rush to make dinner, the characters
still talking, the apple
eaten down to seeds,
stem, the slenderest
of cores.


Copyright 1995, Linda Curtis Meyers


Linda Curtis Meyers is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. Her poetry has been
published in many journals, including Poetry Northwest, Hawaii Review, and Calapooya Collage.
"The Apple Eater" was previously published in the Seattle Review (Fall 1995/ Winter 1996).
Another version of this poem also appeared in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You: A Book of
Her Poems and His Poems Collected in Pairs
, ed. by Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul B. Janeczko
(Simon & Schuster, 1996).


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