Guavas
Do you like guavas?
My parents have a tree
heavy with fruit.
We picked them after lunch yesterday.
My dad brought out the ladder,
handed me his cane so I could pull on the
branches and reach them.
“There—that one. Do you see it?” he points
as I grab the lone fruit perched behind
the leaves and drop it in the yellow plastic bag
mom had saved from the Asian market.
Slow, Sad, Sunday
Soft jazz in the background:
“Flicker of a Smile.”
Still—the faint sound of an ambulance
comes through,
barely.
Chloe De Los Reyes is a teacher-scholar and occasional (tentative!) poet whose work is shaped by language, memory, longing, and meaning-making. Her scholarly work appears in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. She recently coauthored the chapter, “Writing to be Seen and Needing to be Heard: Writing as Emergency from the Perspective of the SBCCD Asian and Pacific Islander Association,” in Writing Emergencies: Composing (Ourselves) in Times of Crisis, edited by Holly Hassel and Kate Pantelides.
In her downtime, she enjoys gardening, cooking, and consuming poetry.
