Tag: pie

How Bad Can Blueberry Pie Be? by Peter Schireson

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How Bad Can Blueberry Pie Be?

I remember one time
over dessert in a roadside diner,
my father asked out loud,
“How bad can blueberry pie be?
Because that’s how bad this is.”

I miss him.
Recollections huddle up—
In response to me asking
what he thought he’d feel
in his last moments of life,
he said he thought he’d be angry.
I asked what he thought he’d say.
“Shit,” he said.

There is a word in Portuguese,
saudade, for the ache of things
that you cannot get back to.

The night is unimpressed,

the silence solid and black,
only the blinking
bulletin of stars,
and a few scraps of sound
somewhere nearby—

two crows having a brief chat.
Crows say what they have to say,
then quiet.
I have tried to learn this skill for years.

* 

Peter Schireson grew up in California, studied at UC Berkeley, University of Victoria, and Harvard University. After retiring from a career, first in education and later in business, he returned to school to earn an MFA from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He has published six volumes of poems. He has trained in Zen in both the US and Japan, and is married to the psychologist and Zen teacher, Grace Jill Schireson. They live in Palm Springs, California with their small dogs, Dewey and Thomas.

There should always be pie in a poem, — by Lailah Shima

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There should always be pie in a poem,

she muses, when you writhe under weight
of worry, precarity of hope.

Calloused, her hands slice apples, sprinkle
spices, drizzle honey. Measure nothing.

You don’t understand. Unceasing,
she crimps a circular seam along the lip

of a glass dish, as out the door you drift. Mind
your feet, she chimes, as if sidestepping

despair could be enough. Screech owl tremolo
and sharp slant of late light pull your torso

upright. You hoist your body into the center
of a seven-stemmed cedar. Let it cradle you.

Your vertebrae vibrate along one of its spines
as it sways and sings in gusts of wind,

as dusk settles. Below, mycelium woven with roots
shuttles carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous

plant to plant, according to need –
shuttles signals your cells also receive.

Cardamom, cinnamon, ginger.
Persist, persist, persist.

*

A mystified mother of teens, dedicated practitioner of Zen, and aspiring hospice chaplain, Lailah Shima lives and writes in Wisconsin. Her poems have so far appeared mostly on friends’ phone screens, but also in CALYX Journal (when she was still Lailah Ford) and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.