I know there are more beautiful ways
to see motherhood,
but standing at the display of glass apples,
I think of the nicked skin,
or the apple’s grey bruising.
Imagine how the fruit fly,
parasitic to the orchard,
finds herself an apple realizing its own
perfection. Then, enter
her ovipositor.
Thrust from the underside of her belly,
the dimple she stabs into the skin,
the unctuous drip
to deposit her eggs.
Upon hatching, her railroad worms,
their puce tunnels mined
through the flesh.
How the artists rendered such honesty
to the apple’s pitting,
its marbled mess.
The fruit fly’s imprint,
how she’d ruin the world to give
her wet offspring their lives.
Michelle Boland’s poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, Lily Poetry Review, Calyx Journal, and Pangyrus, among others. Her work has also been awarded runner-up in Blue Earth Review’s Dog Daze Poetry Contest. She lives in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles and has recently completed her first full-length poetry collection, Burnflower.
