Author's note: The first poem, "Harvest," I wrote using a form I've been having fun with lately, called the Golden Shovel.  The last word in each line of the poem matches, word for word, a line from a selected poem. 

Harvest
        Your world is kinder, figuring the dense, bewildering mass. The
​           face-down side of the bright apple.
                                -from Where it Led You, by Cherry Smith

Wilderness and domesticity wrestle in your
mind as an old apple tree holds the world
in a patch of neglected wood that is
just past the collapsed barbed wire fence, a kinder
boundary now, on these musky fall days, figuring
a gentle, elemental release to the
breathing soil, which cannot differentiate the dense
tangle of thirsty root from its own bewildering
claim on fallen fruit.  A type of folk Mass
unfolds in this sun dappled cathedral, the
absorption of one body into another, the face
of the orb cheerful, even after the sudden drop down
to earth. We’re told Eve came from Adam’s side,
that she chose knowledge, shunned the tree of
life, as if there ever could have been real choice. O, the
delusion shattered, when you bend, grasp for the bright
fruit, half claimed already by a loam tasting of lost apple.





Blueberry Memory

​
Conceived of like giggles 
outdoor gaggles 
elbows and knees
a rolling jubilee of fingers-full
full lips speaking blue 

each one 
fuller round than a marble
soft and firm as a nipple


-First published in Hummingbird:  Magazine of the Short Poem