Eating Apples
A family memory—as small as how Uncle Buck ate an apple—connects generations, even through loss and grief.
Every time I eat an apple, I think
of my Uncle Buck eating apples,
or rather I think of my mom
telling me how he ate them,
my quiet uncle who loved horses
and who cracked open
the fresh wounds of our hearts
when the cancer claimed him
so soon after it claimed his brother,
my father. I might have seen it—
Uncle Buck eating lunch
in the shop office, air conditioner hissing,
the smell of oil and gas
laced with sweet apple
as he ate skin and flesh,
his eyes closed as he pushed on,
down and around and down,
biting through the green crunch of core
and the hard black seeds
until all that remained
was a slim brown crook of stem,
a comma that once linked fruit to tree.
About the author
Carrie Green
Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming inAmerican Life in Poetry,Verse Daily,Bellingham Review,Still: The Journal,Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She works as a librarian in a Kentucky public library, where she hosts the Prompt to Page writing podcast.