Winner of the 2025 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Belfast Poetry Festival.
Stacked & freakishly stunning, each orb, every flashing peel
glossy, mooning yellow hazards beckoning amber & oblate.
The most beautiful fruit, a dimpled curiosity, wholly new
in my winter-chapped hand. I, too, felt grafted & ungrounded,
a miracle of girth as the scale’s needle shook & settled.
It commanded my counter on a bird-patterned plate.
I felt my love turning, souring alone, late-night,
leaning over it deliciously lost & sloppy.
I prepared the fruit as my father did —
slicing it into citrus wagon wheels, tracing tender walls
so pockets of pulp pulled away without complaint,
with a spooned slush of sugar to break bitterness.
Back then, I thought I’d found every sweetness
I’d ever love. Maybe I did. I did shamelessly
suck all I could from those fruitful years. I’m sorry
for so much squeezing, lacking pity for the pith.
Still, the fruit cleaved & clutched with its fancy,
candied happiness that can’t fill but satisfies.
Slipping like memory, which sparks
from body more than brain, I now know.
Oh, holy hybrid, your modern design
is divine intervention. Your brief, ruby season
passes crisply. You’re so conditional;
combining & crossing your seeds into anomaly!
Designed in the 1980s, slick risks & rewards,
only now I know your firm features.
Joy is hopeful engineering.
I pull my second husband,
sleepy & sliding towards middle age,
from the couch, still considering you.
Maybe you’re my new idea of love:
mellow, golden evening gowning down around us,
the lush hushing of memory’s dark mouth.
Jennifer Edwards
Jennifer R. Edwards’ Unsymmetrical Body, was a Boston Author’s Club Julia Ward Howe Award Finalist, Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention and First Horizon Finalist. Recent honors include the 2025 Maine Postmark Contest (judged by Tim Seibles), John Hay Literary Society Contest, Iron Horse Literary Review NaPoMo Finalist, NEPC Amy Lowell Prize, Pushcart and BOTN noms. Her poems appear in anthologies and lit mags including RHINO, Terrain, The Shore, SoFloPoJo, One Art, Beaver Magazine, Citron Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts and MER. She’s a neurodiversity-affirming speech-language pathologist in Concord, NH and earned an MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work and socials can be found in her linktree.
