Bruce Whitacre | Christmas Oranges

CHRISTMAS ORANGES

The children were not to watch

as Father unloaded the snowcapped wagon.

Crates and bushels went straight to the cellar

and under an Indian blanket.

Father pocketed the key with a wink.

Jennie had to sit to keep breathing,

her hands trembling as she cracked the walnuts.

 

That evening, candles clipped to the fir were lit.

Their dots of light graced the gingham bows, the popcorn

strings, casting deep shadows in the parlor corners.

Atop the white tablecloth brought from Ohio,

turkey with stuffing, yams, and fruit pies crowded

the table, so everyone ate standing or in the parlor.

Mother fanned herself at the fire, exhausted, while

Nora, the hired girl, hovered, hiding homesick tears.

Family and neighbors joined in rolling up the rugs,

then with fiddles and dancing. Jennie missed the beat.

Stepping to the window, she gazed through the frosted panes.

Stars arched over the prairie. Horses stomped under their blankets.

 

Father called her into the kitchen.

“I want you to see these first, Jennie. Remember?”

His carpenter’s hands, deft and hard, pried a crate open.

Golden spheres burned into view, sweet and strange.

“Oranges!” she cried. Father laughed, “They made the last train.”

She remembered from last year to peel them first

The flesh exploded in her mouth —

Ocean. Green. Warm. Sunshine.

She closed her eyes and swallowed. Not here, in one taste.

 

She carried a bowlful into the parlor.

The music stopped. The dancers paused.

She beamed as everyone surrounded her, each reaching for

an orange, the only ones any of them would eat that year.

The night froze in her memory like crystals on the panes

melting into a tale from time to time, like now,

for me, then freezing again for the next blue hour.

 

 

_____________________________

Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today, and was recently nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues.  He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. An activist and advocate for the arts and social justice, Bruce lives in Forest Hills, Queens.