Christian Sammartino
Supper with Fried Apples Ending in the World Series
You peel back the skins of a few apples
with the blade of our best knife, split them
into unbroken spirals of delicate gold.
They are worthy of the tales of comets,
the vapor trails on the moonshots the Sox
launch into orbit over Fenway.
Your palms are slick with juice that gleams
just as bright as stadium lights and the morning dew
in the orchards back in the Lehigh Valley.
We could grocery shop in the Back Bay
with those shades of gold. We could own this whole city
with that hometown discount, walk off home run swagger.
You make me a believer, even as you pretend
the incantations you mutter are just instructions
for this ramshackle recipe, not a prayer for work.
Not a quiet anthem to disguise the grumbling
from your stomach, which groans like an anxious
crowd in the bottom of the ninth.
Dog days are fading into September harvests,
sizzling like the cast iron skillet on our stove,
burning our last drops of clover honey,
filling our appetite with a hive of radiant
light so bright it oozes all over the half-moon
slices of apples you cut and keeps going until
Commonwealth buzzes with a glowing
colony of wings from Boston College to Park Street.
Until mothers sing your recipie as a lullaby.
We don’t celebrate with sprayed champagne,
championship parades up Lansdowne and Boylston.
Our trophy ceremony is eating apples straight from the pan
as sugar and honey drips off crescent slices,
until we have batted for the whole lunar cycle,
and our cabinets are as empty as the new moon.
You became my favorite player—the way you won
the World Series of our last meal, loved the orchard
of our starvation until it was heavy with fruit.
—Submitted on 09/12/2020
Christian Sammartino is the founding editor of the Rising Phoenix Review. His poems have appeared in Yes Poetry, Rogue Agent, Apiary, Tilde, Ghost City Press, and other journals. Sammartino studied religion and philosophy at West Chester University, and is a library communications technician at Francis Harvey Green Library. When he is not writing poetry, or creating new graphic designs for his library, you can find him hiking through Pennsylvania’s state parks with his wife Kelsey.
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