never bloom or bear fruit.
Water will make it better
and maybe tomorrow,

tall as him and barren
they will get started. Near
the clearing, deputies are waiting.

The child is waiting for a tomato
cut by his father’s knife, slice
into rose, food which the librarian

told him a man once stood on the steps
in the city eating one after the other
to prove they weren’t poison,

which, she smiled, were called
love apples. He is waiting with his father.
Water
will make it better, his father
says, smoking. They will line
them up on the kitchen counter,

warm and wet and heavy.
If his father says tomato,
then it will be,

maybe tomorrow
or the day after, he tells
the deputies waiting.

Angie Macri’s recent work appears in Cumberland River Review and Green Mountains Review, and her chapbook Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past is available from Finishing Line Press. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she teaches in Little Rock.