This memory I can’t understand:
it is early evening
and the air smells like spring water.
I follow you into a cold, wide room.
Flecks of white paint fall like snowflakes
from the ceiling. The room feels naked
except for the stacks of wooden crates
along three of the four walls.
The crates are filled with apples.
The apples are rotting.
A shipment, you say, from the government.
I don’t know if this is true or not,
or why else a room in an empty house
would be filled with abandoned apples.
Apples tower above us,
green-skinned and sweet in their dying,
crushing themselves into juice.
*
We drove along the road to the Eastern
mountains until we lost phone service.
This was the end of the European Union.
I don’t remember why you parked your car
on the shoulder of the road beside
the wheat fields, but then we were walking
through the golden foothills, the long stalks
of grain bending at our knees. At dusk,
we took the long way home, the road
winding past old wooden churches
that were once Orthodox and then made
Catholic, black against the darkening sky.
Later, in Lviv, a woman covered in blood
crossed the road — gashes of red across
her torso and thighs, as if she’d come
from the war in the East. The stains were bright
as cranberries. I looked back and I’d lost her
to the crowded intersection. I thought of her
from the white crosses of the Polish soldiers’
cemetery, to the marble of the famous opera
house, and as the sky melted into evening colors
on the bus ride back home, I felt her in the
mountain chill: the smell of apple blossoms
and a red moon against the skin of my eyelids.
–
Rachel Walker is a poet from Maryland. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri. Her work has appeared in The Emerson Review, trampset, Lunch Ticket, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and other journals.