“Eating my first peach after knee surgery” by Ekiwah Adler Belendez

This peach is a cool sun.

Stars hang in the dark branches of space
under the sway of gravity

yet still their light travels
into dark distances –

to enter me this time
in the flesh of this peach

firing the synapses of memory
my tongue holds…

I remember the taste of a woman
who brought with her tenderness
a new unidentified species –

flying colonies of peaches.
shimmering and vanishing.

Do I have the right
to keep missing her?

Biting this peach
I know there are places
where I’ve stored juices of our rapid kisses.

Within my porous darkness
there hangs a peach
a bold circumference of light.

The son of a North American father and a Mexican mother, Ekiwah Adler Belendez is the author of five collections of poetry, Soy (I Am); Palabras Inagotables, (Never-ending Words); Weaver (2003), his first book in English; The Coyotes Trace, which features an introduction by Mary Oliver.