we choose cherry pie over chocolate cake,
perhaps because she wants change, or because
it is August and charming boxes of cherries
sang us their sour song at the farmers' market.
In the white porcelain bowl they are round and smooth,
like she, too lovely to mar with pitting.
They are plump as the breasts that assert themselves
to the forefront like new ideas, red as the nurture
sleeping in her womb waiting for life
or the moon-dark flow that will accompany
her into the fullness of possibility,
tart as the sorrow that will follow her youth
as surely as tides the moon, and inviting
as life is on the early side of its discoveries,
its duties, its unexpected sadness,
and surprises of small beauties like
this twelve-year-old girl and this waiting bowl
brimming with unpitted, ripe pie cherries.
Maureen Tolman Flannery's fourth book is Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher's Daughter. Having grown up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband Dan raised their four children in Chicago. Her work has appeared in many journals, recently including Pedestal, Atlanta Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Calyx.
