By Joseph Johnson
Maybe it was Milton or Caedmon who
first claimed the Tree of Knowledge held apples,
which says more about English poets than
of the preference of divine arborists.
They proposed that any great fall must be
punctuated by a skin-piercing crunch—
a violent accent, percussive and wet.
Though I first read that story in Granger,
in the central Washington wasteland,
among the irrigation canals that
brought the river into the brush and fields,
where, for my first job, I gleaned high branches
from a shaky twelve-foot tripod ladder.
So, I imagine Eve succumbing to
a fruit that would, in the words of Donne’s “Flea,”
“purple the nail”: the mahogany-red
Chelan cherry, dangling amid fern-green
leaves, begging to be tickled or fondled
by a hungry finger tracing the trough,
the firm, subtle seam cleft like young buttocks.
Or God, the watchful orchardist—sure that
neither frost nor rain could ravage his fruit—
perching plastic owls, draping his trees
in nets, decorating the leaves and limbs
with tinsel to deter predacious birds.
Joseph Johnson writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. His work has appeared in Flash, Heron Tree, Rust+Moth, Aethlon, and The Santa Clara Review, among others. He has won the Editor’s Choice Award for Carve Magazine and was a finalist for the Fiction Southeast’s Ernest Hemingway Flash Fiction Prize and for the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Contest. He is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.