untitled
(rejected name: what we’d do in a reckoning)
By Heather Smith
and
we picnic in the garden of eden, but
you forgot the strawberries, so
we have to improvise.
peeling apples with a plastic knife, dissolving into laughter,
this was never our plan.
but you kiss my cheek as the sun falls down,
and i imagine everything much clearer now:
violets we planted
bloom in a few years’ time, behind
picket fences meant to be snuck past,
(there’s a bitter taste to trespassing, but,
a sea-salt caramel will dull the ache,) and
the serpents try to talk to us, but
we don’t listen and
the sun tries to talk to us, but
we don’t listen and
when the father calls on the number i already left,
we both hit decline.
sunday picnics are our favorite.
(written november first 2022, while drinking tea and trying to bring the title that’d been in my notes app for a year to fruition. re-tied on the eighth.)
(This poem is a 2023 Scholastic Writing Awards Honorable Mention.)
The Trinity Review 