The Traveler’s Vade Mecum, Line #4646:‘Vegetation Grows Rapidly’

← v12n2, Fall 2013

Biting into a Calmyrna fig I taste

the frantic wasp, how her wings tore off

at the unripe hull’s door.

How her ovipositor thrust, failing,

enzymes seducing her gravid body,

which had already hauled itself free

from the goat fruit

swollen with her sisters—

caprifigs stapled by the handful to each tree,

married to the Calmyrna orchard.

I can hear those paper bags singing.

The air ripples with sugar.

The farmer tells me each fig

is a bloom, housed in its own stem.

My teeth slice to the nutty roe of drupelets,

a bouquet left on a graveyard stone.

nature body ecology

Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for her book Theories of Falling (New Issues, 2008), selected by Marie Howe. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best New Poets (Samovar, 2005) and in journals such as SLATE, The Believer, 32 Poems, and Barrow Street. Awards for her work include the 2006 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North and fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the editorial staff of The American Scholar .