The Peach

By Alice Friman

I stood on a corner eating a peach,

the juice running down my arm.

A corner in Pergos where he left me,

Pergos where I could catch a bus.

What was I supposed to do now

alone, my hands sticky with it

standing on the corner where he

left me a Greek peach, big as a softball,

big as an orange from Spain, but it

wasn’t from Spain, but from Pergos,

where I could see his red truck

disappear around a corner, not

my corner but further up the street,

and only later, months later, back

home when the trees were slick

with ice, their topmost branches

shiny as swords stabbing the heart

out of the sky, the earth chilled under

snowdrifts or as we tend to say, sleeping.

But I don’t know, frozen maybe, numb?

Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2021 by Alice Friman, “The Peach” from The Georgia Review Vol LXXV No. 3. Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.