Beginning
- Beginning
At breakfast, the scent of lemons, just-picked, yellowing on the sill. At the table, a man and woman.
Between them, a still-life: shallow bowl, damask plums in one square of morning light.
The woman sips tea from a chipped blue cup, turning it, avoiding the rough white edge.
The man, his thumb pushing deep toward the pit, peels taut skin clean from plum flesh.
The woman watches his hands, the pale fruit darkening wherever he’s pushed too hard.
She is thinking seed, the hardness she’ll roll on her tongue, a beginning. One by one,
the man fills the bowl with globes that glisten. Translucent, he thinks. The woman, now, her cup tilting
empty, sees, for the first time, the hairline crack that has begun to split the bowl in half.
Selected works by Natasha Trethewey:
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• Accounting
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• Beginning
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• Calling His Children Home
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• Closing Time
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• Deedywops
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• Delta Sharecroppers, 1930
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• Expectant
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• History Lesson
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• Hot Comb
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• The House Down the Street
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• Saturday Drive
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• Secular
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• The Four Corners
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• Laying the Waves
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• An Interview with Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey, a member of the Dark Room Collective, is studying for the Ph.D. in English at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), where she received the M.F.A. in creative writing in 1995. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The Massachusetts Review, Seattle Review, Agni, The Southern Review, African American Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Callaloo.
