Citrus
My friend often stops by at lunch to talk
about our kids–how hard it is and how lovely.
It usually happens, because I love them,
that I’m eating an orange, or a mandarin,
Sumo, blood orange, temple–one of that whole
bodacious family of juicy mamas, and I separate
a section or two bursting with cellular juice
and hand them to my friend.
A little gift, a tender tradition.
After several years of these orangey
offerings, ripe recognitions
of our motherly friendship, she tells me
her mother did this for her too, when she was small,
peeling off a single wedge at a time, ensuring
that her picky daughter would eat.
I felt called out, mothering as mother a mother,
but mine are not worry-gifts, they’re full
of confidence that when you mother the world
when you give it gifts of care over and over
peeled, fresh & pithless each time,
we all get to be beloved daughters.
Sara eddy
Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. She is also the author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019).
Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others.
She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
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