To a Small, Sweet Calimyrna Fig
by Paulann Petersen
published in Weber
Half dried, half not. Skin puckered. Your stem-end curves directly into your golden-bronze body scabbed here and there with sugar so brash it oozes out.
I do care a fig for you, soft pouch of sweetmeat that grew beside leaves a hundred times your size. To tear you open reveals a sticky bed of glistening seed. To bite, to chew, is to grind the sun’s fine grit against my teeth.
To you, my own unused seeds might seem familiar. Tiny, gleaming eggs going nowhere but backward now. Absorbed, as you will be, by my half-puckered body. Fuel for its onward wizening.
