Recipe

by Skye Shirley 

Mine is a kind of imagination
that can’t crack an egg
without being haunted.

If an apple is beautiful,
it is poisoned, just waiting
for a woman like me to eat it

straight off the branch.
But I trust the fruit entirely,
even guiding the knife
through the core’s star
with a flourish.

It is good you have gone
at the peak of harvest season.
The apple’s honesty,
its seeds stuck to the blade —

I welcome it home,
a tender sin.

Skye Shirley was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up on the Rice University campus until she was 10 years old.  Her father’s family is from Virginia and Kentucky, and her mother’s family hails from the Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee. She graduated from Boston College in 2010 with a major in English and Creative Writing and received the Dever Creative Writing Fellowship after the completion of her poetry thesis, “The Good Women.” Her chapbook, Opening the Storm Door, received the McCarthy Creative Writing Award in 2009, and her poem “The Paper Called Them Black-Fish” received the Gary Fincke Prize for Poetry. Her poetry has been published in Sow’s Ear, Susquehanna Review, Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009, Pure Francis and Post Road.