2 October 2009 | Vol. 9, No. 3

Peaches, How to Eat

Plums and bananas in fingers; small apples in fingers if you choose, pears the same.
– Emily Post

In hooves, trying to get inside the apple without

breaking the skin, or inside the Orangery at closing,

oh, and in that, a hymn containing the words

taken from the antique store down on 2nd Avenue.

The place to pause is on the doorstep. A Graham

Greene novel, thinking you might be in one.

Sitting down as though leaving at once were not

on your mind but after two or three minutes, saying,

"Goodbye." Trigonometry, owning it. News,

when it passes you by like a waiter seating a party.

TV, the way you see it when it is no longer on.

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About the author:

Elizabeth Hughey's first book, Sunday Houses the Sunday House, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2007. New poems have recently appeared in Caffeine Destiny, Zoland Poetry, Free Verse, and Starting Today: Poems for the first 100 Days in Office. She teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and is a contributing editor at Bateau Press.

For further reading:

See the complete list of work by Elizabeth Hughey at 42opus. Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 9, No. 3, where "Peaches, How to Eat" ran on October 2, 2009. List other work with these same labels: poetry.

42opus is an online magazine of the literary arts.

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