Pecan Tree
We were sitting underneath a fig tree
Barret Smith
I put my hands together
to collect pecans from the ground
I hide them in my pockets
to run backwards through the streets.
I never saw a Pecan Tree
Until I set foot in Jonesboro, AR.
But when I saw one the first time
I thought of my mother, I thought of Peru,
In her homeland Ica, the desert
She left behind the year she was born.
I like to go around the Pecan Tree
I like how my kids climb it
From there they tell me stories and jokes:
“Her name was Barb and she had to fart”
Trees are books also
Books that devours us
From within like little cannibals
Books that hang like human flesh
from the Pecan Tree that grows inside us
Books are hanged
Little women,
Around the World in Eighty Days
Treasure Island,
and my runaway and lonely heart.
(poem published in Arkansas Review 46.3 (Fall 2015): 181. Print.)
