Meditation on 35

Catherine Esposito Prescott

Trees saged over us,
one-hundred years into their lifetimes,
carrying messages under soil.

My hair was pixie,
a short, spiked afterthought, my life,
the size of two small boys.

The kitchen table held rainbow-colored
plastic bowls filled with dried cereal,
raisins, goldfish. We ate too fast

for politeness, for linens. Hunger
dictated every move.
Between walking to the beach,

between what passed for school,
between afternoons at the children’s museum
sorting fake food, processing

plastic oranges and learning to limbo,
between after-dinner dance
parties and swim lessons,

there was never silence. We gathered
mangos in a friend’s yard. Trees rained
fruit to the tiny humans below.

Large, oval eggs, golden orbs
polka-dotted her lawn like many fallen suns.
The present moment focused

every thought. The boys’ hands
gathered as many as they could carry.
We had no recipe to follow.

The world was as it is, as it’s always been,
but our horizon focused on the forever-
summer sky. This was before grief,

before the myth of Icarus crystalized
in their minds, before many diagnoses.
The world was too new for sleep.

We peeled back the skin, and tossed
slivers of sweet fruit into our mouths.
Nectar poured from our lips soaking our feet.

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of Accidental Garden, which won Gunpowder Press’s 2022 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (selected by Danusha Laméris), and the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of SWWIM Every Day. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, EcoTheo Review, Northwest Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and ​​West Trestle Review. Prescott holds an MFA from NYU.