Fjords Reviews

Everyone has a fruit story if you grew
up east of the Wall in somewhere Berlin,
Warsaw, Budapest, Subotica.
Every dad every uncle every brother—
even the ones who were layabouts
brought home grapefruits. Sacs
of sweet cherries just out of season.
Honeydews either too soft or too
graceless and misshapen for a market
table in the Allied occupation zones.
Sometimes the fruit smelled of cigarettes.
Sometimes of homemade brandy.
Sometimes tractor diesel would climb
onto my tongue and camp there for days
and I never minded having to live
with it because that’s how we lived then—
hard and flat and totally fruitless
but for the grapes on the hillsides
peppered with bombs shards
and the rusting city bicycles and Levis
strewn into the paprika garden
next to this town or that town’s bordello.
Sometimes the border guards, the ones filled up
with their morose audacities and aching
would lean close to that barbed wire
in the fields outside of Balaton and trade
a whole watermelon for an hour of kisses
and I gave it all up because I wanted it.