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      November 12, 2015OrangesLauren S. Cook

      Today I sliced navels
      for my son’s soccer game.
      I took care to cut them evenly,
      to trim the pith. I know
      this is unremarkable—
      a soccer mom, a fruit poem.
      I promise I’m a person
      of average tragedy who
      scours each happiness
      for its flaw. I can’t
      help that they looked
      picturesque piled
      in a bowl. I nearly called in
      my partner to look—
      but I know the smallness of this
      joy: gauze-thin, vanishing.
      I’m ashamed that I told you,
      but I feel something
      should be said for the oranges—
      not an ode, but a note
      that they were adequate,
      in no way failing, nor I, nor
      the chef’s knife, nor the sun,
      which lit the room in the way
      it does sometimes, illuminating
      the dust in the air, the specks
      gliding on the smallest of currents.

      from #49 - Fall 2015

      Lauren S. Cook

      “When I was sixteen, we studied John Donne in my English class. The class discussed at length the punctuation of the final line of ‘Holy Sonnet X.’ This act of attention between reader and poem—the way a room full of teenagers talked about a simple comma—is the reason I started writing poetry.”

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