The Carnal Life
       

Your parents' fridge beams like the Ark of the Covenant. It's a week still before Christmas. You liberate a warehouse-store jar of peaches big enough to feed a fruit-starved bohemian family in a Cather novel through the winter. You pull a spoon from the third drawer you open. The peaches are quartered and glossy and gold as the late-summer sun igniting black-eyed Susans, but barely fit in the shallow bowl of the ice cream spoon you've chosen. So you find yourself slurping in whole mouthfuls, extra-light syrup and spit coalescing into a tear at the bevel of your lip. You hunch over the kitchen sink so not to spill on the hardwood or forehead of the shepherd mix at your hip with an insatiable appetite for anything. And they are, of course, sweet and delicious and cold and fancy grade, freshly packed at the pinnacle of California's select ripeness eternal—slick as Bathsheba's thigh risen into the moonlight and tattooed by shadow.

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from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission