I first read this poem years ago, never imagining that a person could soak apples in sea salt and vinegar. And years later, I swear, a woman would teach me how the tagin turns a green apple into something spectacular. We were outside an Arizona jail, and I didn’t think there was anything to be discovered in a jail parking lot. Reading Rosal’s poem made me step out of the tagin, slice apples, and remember how poems create the story of a heart and remind us of home. Selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts
The woman you love cuts apples for you
By Patrick Rosal
and stir them in sea salt and vinegar
She takes a whiff of her Silk Cut
tapers again through the flesh of the fruit
the blade stopping before his thumb
You both sweat on your shoulder
(The hottest summer in East Ham) And because
there is this woman who cuts apples
stirring them in vinegar remembering
of an afternoon twenty-five years ago when
you knelt with your brothers at your mother’s house
feet for picking apple slices in a small basin
pinched between his legs and one of you
would lift that bowl – almost completely empty
except for a sour cloudy liquid
and some seeds that move at the bottom
You would just like to taste it at first but soon you give it away
from brother to brother swallowing at the top of their lungs
of that tart cider until your lips turn white
and numb, you won’t dare tell anyone you learned
love the taste of something so strange until it does
woman cuts apples for you in vinegar
and the familiar fumes fill your nostrils and your esophagus
She’ll raise the bowl to drink, she’ll wring her face
and laugh when she offers it to you and you will drink
and she will drink and you will drink again
She’ll kiss your severed joint She’ll kiss your eyes
Of course the vinegar stings
It’s the hottest summer ever in London
And you and the woman you love fall asleep side by side
like that – smelly and unwashed – breathing
each other dreams of open skin
Reginald Dwayne Bett is a poet and a lawyer. He created the Million Book Project, an initiative to organize micro-libraries and install them in prisons across the country. His latest collection of poetry, ” Felon ”, explores the post-incarceration experience. In 2019, he won a National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism for his article in The Times Magazine on his journey from teenage carjacker to aspiring lawyer. Patrick rosal is a writer and former Guggenheim Fellow whose work includes “My American Kundiman” (Persea Books, 2006). He adapted this poem from a longer version appearing in “The Last Thing” (Persea Books, 2021). He teaches at Rutgers University in Camden.
