Orchard Pigs

A new poem 🍎

Greetings! The editors at The Clayjar Review just released their final issue of the year—“Bounty”—and kindly included a new poem of mine. You can read and listen to “Orchard Pigs” below, but also I encourage you to peruse the whole issue. What I’ve read has stirred my heart to gratitude, and I look forward to reflecting on the rest this week of Thanksgiving.

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Orchard Pigs

Five thousand trees endowed with ruddy fruit.
But one could overwhelm our wooden pails
and flush our veins with sugar. Still we stroll
the fecund rows, pretending to discrim-
inate between a flawless gala and
a flawless gala and another and…

The tang of windfall oozes from the grass,
where still more apples waste away among
buzzed honey bees. Margins can’t be great,

keeping a place like this. Not long ago
farmers would loose their pigs into the trees
to clear out fallen fruit. The orchard to
themselves, they’d guzzle apples till their brains
fermented hard as cider, squealing round
and around the rows beneath an opal moon.

We filled our buckets, filled our stomachs more.
We felt obliged to relish every limb.
Not (as it were) to get our money’s worth,
but in a eucharist of sorts: to taste
infinity, juice dripping down our chins.