Caitlin O’Halloran

Bowls of Fruit

My husband’s favorite kind of art
is always the bowl of fruit.
Not the frenzied splatters of Jackson Pollock,
or surrealist paintings by Salvador Dalí.
He glances only briefly
at iconographies of Christ.

And when I lose track of him,
I somehow always find him
standing before a bowl of fruit.
Red apples, ripe bananas,
an occasional pineapple
that rests against the brim,
clusters of black cherries,
and purple grapes spilling
across tablecloths.

“Why fruit?” I ask, and he struggles to answer.
“It’s fruit” he says, as if that can explain—
“What I mean is, that it doesn’t pretend
to be anything more than what it is.”

Caitlin O’Halloran is a biracial Filipino-American writer living in Rochester, New York. Her poetry has been published in literary magazines, including ONE ART, confetti, Third Wednesday, The Basilisk Tree, and FERAL: A Journal of Poetry & Art. www.caitlinohalloran.com