By: Keith Huettenmoser
No one has picked the apple tree this year.
Time will never learn to be content
to let what was be, so the wasps come in.
Rotten apples teach lessons in growing
down to where bones have trouble finding home.
We bodies die out and become rain.
No need for a sewn signature to know
dawn is full of walking dependencies.
The way we lean on the land to remind us
there's no harm in wanting the answers dogs know.
They understand the yard of apples and wasps.
While the sun blushes with possibility
somewhere, the moon wants its sacrifice.
Someone we've loved is pressing a dream
against the burning of this ruined garden.
Keith Huettenmoser is a poet and prose writer from the mountains of New Jersey. He is the author of several poems and short stories. His work has appeared in Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, Badlands, Sooth Swarm Journal, and others. He is currently working on his third novel, a poetry collection, and teaches college English.
"I was staying with my partner at her father’s house. In his front yard was the last apple tree of what used to be an apple orchard many years ago. It was a sunrise apple tree. You can tell by cutting one of the apples in half and the seed pattern is like that of a star. Our first year there we took the apples and made a pie. We stayed there for a few years. Every season, we’d have to cut loose the dead branches to let the living limbs still grow their fruit. There wasn’t much of the tree left when we moved, but it was still blooming. I drive by the house occasionally. No one picks the apples anymore. When the apples aren’t picked, and they fall to the ground, the yard fills with wasps eventually."
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