My mother picked peaches in the fields
my father did, where they reached into the same trees
a thousand times and plucked, from the morning’s
ear, the fruit that shed its fuzz on their flannel shirts,
made them itch until their necks burned
from sun and sweat and tiny hairs,
not unlike the ones that grew in blonde above my lip
before I waxed them off in hopes
of finding someone to shoot me straight
into the sky, without purpose.
When I was sixteen I fell in love with a girl
whose arms would wrap around me while she slept,
whose hips would press mine
into dreams, where I’d pretend this is how
it was supposed to be—a delicate torture,
the deep purr of her congestion rising from her chest
like the sounds my parents must have heard
as the conveyor belts rolled by with mounds
of peaches, some too ripe, too bruised, too young
to be anything at all.
Wendy L. Silva is a queer, Latinx poet from California. She did her undergraduate studies at UC Riverside and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. In 2010, she won the Judy Kronenfeld Award in poetry, and in 2013 she received the Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She currently teaches English at Riverside City College and enjoys reading comics, camping, and hosting game nights. Her most recent work can be found in Line Rider Press, The Packinghouse Review, and the Acentos Review.