FRUIT: A PROSE POEM

Fruit means love in my book. Picking, shopping for, and processing fruit are the few happy family memories I have. And my father would sometimes bring home gifts of exotic fruit for me to try; special attention I was too rarely given. It was bonding time with my father, sometimes my sister, and (in the very early days) with my mother. And my sister and I even picked fruit for my grandmother to process. And fruit gets associated with Grandma's Sunday Dinner Jell-o salads. And those dinners were the only times I saw my brothers (and my sister when she defected from Mother's) for years. And my sister loved how I cut a watermelon. And she almost never showed any appreciation of me during the time, so her words were ripe-watermelon-sweet. Hence fruit=love in Lornaworld. Granted, a pomelo is a tease, because it is a normal-sized sour grapefruit wrapped in three inches of giftwrap. And a prickly pear cactus is just an emo fruit trying to get attention while having nothing sweet and no real substance inside. Kumquats are the joke of nature for looking so sweet and adorable while being just about the most sour things on Earth. But pomegranates are love and sex and the real Eden "apple" that both Eve and Persephone could never resist. A Georgian friend, the one who called me The Antichrist, gets tormented by my talk of crunchy peaches that pass here for the sweet ripe lusciousness of his hometown, but really I'd like to share a pomegranate with him. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Men have offered to give me pomegranates--even on their naked personage, mind you--but soon realized my love was merely for the fruit, not the nuts.