Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Harvest” by Melanie Power, which first appeared in Poetry Pause in March 2020.

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Harvest

By Melanie Power

In acrid sweetness, grapefruit is tang at tongue, acid
searing nervous finger cuts. Let me count the ways
I could have you, that I want to. The thrall of you
coming on, big as a season, ordinary as weather. Even
breakfast is suggestive: the rind is your skin, porous,
lost in limonene. The fruit’s flesh ripe red, two halves open-
faced, its bitter blood staining the throat. The grapefruit was
man-made, orange via pomelo. We kneel, and burn, in cycles.
From the bowl, the fruit dreams of the country it came from.
Like lines of latitude, we lean into earth, never meeting.
The summer could love us. Meet me some July, in other lives,
another province, a bog lit by lupines. Let me touch
you underwater—at Middle Cove Beach, across Atlantic algae
sheets. We hurt, and are hurt, in cycles. The salt, they say,
is good for cuts. By midmonth, the capelin will roll in, flush
against shore, to spawn— the water so silver with fish you can
grab handfuls. Locals salt them for snacks, or press their bodies
into soil for better harvests. Japanese markets covet capelin roe,
the tiny beads they call masago. It bleeds from their silver sides
as they beach. Almost no male survives the season.

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Copyright © Melanie Power

First appeared in Poetry Pause in March 2020.

Previously published in Full Moon of Afraid and Craving, McGill Queen’s University Press, 2022.

Melanie Power is the Montreal-based author of Full Moon of Afraid and Craving, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022.

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