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enjoy this Peter Magliocco writing in the Down in the Dirt free 2011 PDF file chapbook: Ghost Dancers Leaping from a Tome (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2011 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book Ghost Dancers Leaping from a Tome

The Spoiled Plums

Peter Magliocco

To leave her apartment then coldly
In such a hurry, a sink full
Of dirty dishes with food crumbs
Caking to flowered porcelain
Left under a leaking faucet,
Just morose tokens
For an unfinished meal.
The scene of my mother’s
Abandoned apartment when
The paramedics took her
To the hospital for the last time.
I’ve come to clean it days later.
A sad task, she lived alone,
A widow for so long
Her ritual chores were done
With great difficulty in extremis.
I feel her presence, nonetheless,
Inhabiting the kitchen counter
I sweep clear of fruit
She left in mid-meal.
Those decaying remnants for
A metaphysical feast of shadows,
Whose odor infiltrates the days’
Residual air of past longing?
Her purpled plums in disarray,
Now bruised by blackness, uneaten,
Encroach something once edible
With invisible rings of the worm
Her own cremated fresh frustrated.
So many strands of her long gray hair
Yet clung to the carpet’s shag,
Enough copious to weave an empty nest.

I am hungry, Mother.

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