by Jennifer Funk
Not like a tap turned on and not like a match struck
and certainly not like flicking on a light, it is not sudden.
It is barely sweet. Ripe? Hard to tell. Fingers
pressed carefully into the skin, imagine say, a pear,
green, faintly so and tenuous, as though the green
were a blush, as though the pear at the prospect
of being plucked from its tree so many weeks ago
flushed a shade that recalls grass dying in the fall
or the barest beginnings of scallion stems.
Sometimes you tell the story in fits, sometimes
one line at a time.
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