Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
I bite into a peach for the first time in years
leaning over the kitchen sink.
Summer’s dying breaths sing
to me, storms break heat
and root my heels in this ground. I think
of bands named for peaches (peach pit, peach fuzz, peach fuzz)
as I turn the peach in my hand, revealing
breaking flesh and pit. The bowl of fruit
in the fridge is from the neighbor’s yard: their peach tree
must not have been there in my childhood, before they had
their fence and their four screaming children,
when we had our sledding hill and our
elderly neighbors since passed.
None of the fruit trees in our yard bear edible:
bitter crab apples rotting and littering the ground
the lone pear tree which I have never seen sprout a pear
the defunct grape vine which collapsed
when the arbor did two summers ago
the raspberry bushes from before my time
which my grandfather believed vehemently were worse than weeds
and worked to eradicate,
like my mother now perennially fights bittersweet.
August bleeds out and I sit at my kitchen table
or in the hammock in the yard
wondering up at the branches of the grand old oak tree.
Surely those odd barren branches cannot be a sign of decay?
When I’m writing in the kitchen at one a.m., eating a peach over the sink,
I can hear the acorns already falling.
Julia Pols is a student at Vassar College studying English and Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies. She lives in Maine, and writes both poetry and prose.