What I am doing when I am baking apples
Mining for dirt, extracting the core
of bitter pips, lurking cyanide,
knife-tip circling the maggot’s cave.
Immersed in this quiet world of browning flesh,
hard and imperfect, sour and bruised.
Like me, like me, like the heart of me.
No sugar. Deglet Nour dates,
the expense irrelevant, the one cost worth it.
The apples were waiting, tucked in damp grass.
Turning the rotten cheeks back to the soil.
Fallen in autumn turns sin inside out, is where goodness lies.
The spices are coming into season.
Ginger, cardamom, cloves, my year-round cinnamon.
Spices bring dreams, are medicine and flight,
revelations print-labelled to make you forget.
Every time you grate nutmeg, the trance state beckons.
Butter has softened by itself;
like a mother, like all women,
craving time alone in a temperate space.
Moulding around the dates’ jammy fibres,
folding into their fragmented curves, dusted with fragrance.
A yielding mess of glossy promise.
Like me, like me, like the heart of me.
Take your favourite wooden spoon, its handle smooth,
its curved lip skilled and experienced.
Tongue the sweetness into that space you carved.
Replace the worm’s theft, make it better than new.
And then the fire to finish them,
to burnish each globe to a shine.
Liz Kendall is a poet and non-fiction writer based in Surrey. She co-authored the award-winning book Meet Us and Eat Us: Food plants from around the world, a celebration of biodiversity in poetry, prose, and fine art photography. Liz’s writing ranges from ecopoetry to devotional poems for Anubis, mythological creatures, and rock bands. Her work has appeared in Mslexia, Clarion, Consilience, and Amethyst Review, and in anthologies from Candlestick Press, The Hedgehog Poetry Press, Rough Diamond and The Winged Moon. Her website is theedgeofthewoods.uk. Liz also gives Shiatsu and massage and teaches Tai Chi Qigong.
Amethyst Review 