...Claire Christoff Claire Christoff Fruit in August It s a sunny day: stupid, pretty. I put a peach and a nectarine in my bag, pretending not to see a deep gash in the former that will leak its rosy syrup like the worst flirt, draw every fat baby bumblebee. You and I should have met on the side...

.... Italian women chose my register although other lines were open. I didn’t need to be told to double bag, to place bleach and cans on the bottom of their shopping carts, no glass against glass, eggs and peaches on top. No scanners then, we memorized...

... Prufrock said, Do I dare to eat a peach my first thought was, of course, you idiot, it s just a peach! But I noticed, after you read it out loud, that you smiled at Angela, and I wondered if to you those words validated some thought you d had about her, and I hoped instead you could be more like Prufrock...

...Fia Montero fmontw@gmail.com © 2023 Fia Montero 2023 Fia Montero Diastasis Recti Abdominis is the vertical separation of the anterior abdominal wall along the linea alba. embryonic swell stretches apart the muscles splitting them open like an overripe peach. my children recall...

...Anne Baldo © 2007 the minnesota review 2007 20 the minnesota review Anne Baldo you’re not an innocent check-out girl it is your fault the peaches soured, the apricots spoiled, creaming with decay and blowflies. this is the first...

.... In Varner, Arkansas, 2001 the kidnapper orders peach cobbler, Jolly Ranchers and birthday cake. He keeps his eyes turned away while he eats and won’t stop jiggling his knee. In Stark, Florida, March 2002 the murderer orders a dozen...

.... Tosses it into his basket with no affection for the hothouse fruit, watery meat raring to burst from its skin. I want to walk like Mick, to grace the bins of peaches and the just-mopped floor with my debauched parade of one. The alien hand of a dairy worker stocks shelves with cartons of cream, jugs...

... like dewdrops on peaches. This poem needs you dancing like cheerleaders in heat, like sweaty cobras flexing in locker rooms —​mouth these words as you undulate at football games, at basement sleepovers, in handcuffs, in California. Let’s party with this poem in cheap motels...

... every move. You had no hammer, but we didn’t need one. I was forever polishing the same grain of salt. In ten years we’d received bonnets. A team of horses for you and a rifle for me, after canning the summer’s peaches. One day we woke to an unfamiliar backdrop...

... This morning you paint your nails I whisper, yes, yes. The first harvest we couldn t stop touching the fruit It was rubbing our hands across the mint, the basil, the rosemary breathing in Our fingertips it was the peaches, that soft down, that honeyed scent It was the beautiful pressure of a cherry tomato...

... of Aunt Linda’s boudoir. I go into Jamba Juice, I order the Peach Pleasure, I don’t tip ’cause why would I. We played cowboys and Indians in the basement, Aunt Linda was all, pretend you’re eating baked beans straight from the pot. minnesota review 84 (2015) DOI 10.1215/00265667-2857721  ©...

... . Marguerite Nguyen Vietnamese American New Orleans There is nothing special about the house in Village de l’Est, a section of New Orleans so far to the east that some jest it is actually in Mississippi (Tang 2011). It is a modest one-story structure made of peach brick, with a peach roof...

... Market Organs (2017) and JD Debris Murder Club (forthcoming). Claire Denson is a staff poetry reader for Adroit Journal and holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a BA from the University of Michigan. Her work appears in Massachusetts Review, Salt Hill Journal, BOOTH, Peach...

... full, rises a few inches above the jagged horizon like a pockmarked peach. His year-old daughter has finally fallen asleep, and his son, five, has gone up for his bath. From where he stands, beneath the knobby, moss-covered branches of the old pear, he can hear the boy through the open...

... to know, the menu included “chef’s salad, chicken Washington, new potatoes and peas, Trinity College burnt cream, savory crab on toast, followed by port, Madeira, sauterne, claret, biscuits, cheese, fresh peaches, coffee and cigars, brandy and seltzer” [21 She then relates...

... every fruit and vegetable found in the diet of health-conscious, often high-minded consumers is still picked by hand: every head of lettuce, every bunch of grapes, every avocado, peach, and plum,” and this at wages often sinking far below the legal minimum, by workers whose life expectancies...

.... It looked ornamented, and in time he realized it was an apple tree. He was among a neighbor’s orchard. Peaches would be nearby, pear trees. He stayed there in the water and sucked breath as the sunbeams cut down upon the tree and its fruit, the prismatic rays limning in purple and orange lines...

... asked if my not having an orgasm meant that I might be slightly sociopathic. Sam s earlobes were so nice. I wanted to keep them forever. They were beige and slightly fuzzed like the skin of a peach. I didn t see the problem with loving him for only a small part of himself. He was just as obsessed...

... daddy makes me wear it because it’s like I’m wearing my grand- mother is how he sees it.” “Oh.” “Yeah, I know. I’m taking it off.” She pulled the sweater over her head, and let the white tank top she had underneath lift up a couple inches and uncover the loveliest peach skin I had...

... begin to lick them incessantly, causing a thick, itchy, rosy line to appear above my upper lip, a line of purple peach fuzz. No other chapstick or brand helped when my lips chapped. It had to be Balmex, the vanilla flavor, an opaque yellow balm in a 1½-inch-long tube with a r eassuring image of a v...