An Apple is Not a Story
An apple is not a story.
Too much mystery rests in this pale, delicate flesh
For a narrative arc to rise and fall.
An apple is more than a story –
A primly wrapped promise, a ruse. A guise.
Forbidden to be consumed in one sitting.
It comes to life for those not afraid of seeing
A crimson harbinger of joy,
Of knowing
A foreteller of truths,
Of tipping
Juicy balances of time,
…Tasting line by line,
Nibbling crisp tart words.
To satisfy her curiosity, vast and unquenchable,
She steps carefully over
The circle of fruit that surrounds her.
Glutted with ripe flesh.
Earth-bound with drunkenness,
Heedless of distant sounds of roaring highways,
She seeks the secrets of the soil
And seeds buried for doubting tongues.
Wasps murmur in the grass.
An idea of an apple waits in the trees for its resurrection
As chlorophyll-laden leaves transform
Rays of sun
Into nectar-filled flowers
That
will
become …
© Norah Vawter 2013
Norah Vawter wishes that time travel were possible so she could visit the 1920s and party with Scott Fitzgerald, then talk literature. She got her MFA in fiction from George Mason University and her BA in English from William and Mary. While at William and Mary, she was the fiction editor of the W&M Review, one of the only national journals edited exclusively by undergraduates. At GMU, Norah again served as fiction editor for a national journal, So to Speak. She has published short stories, poetry, book reviews and author interviews. Her writing has appeared most recently in Stymie, The Tottenville Review and Opium Magazine. She lives with her husband and son in the DC area, where she is finishing her first novel.
