We found the chipped
ceramic dish in a cupboard,
relic of the ordinary
dailiness of her housewife’s
life, the elegant arc
of her wrist, her palm
when she scored
a tomato, split the skin
and slipped the sweet,
fecund innards into
the white bowl, the bowl
she’d painted and fired
long before she’d had a child—
its dark, summer cherries
pressed like nipples, like finger
paint thumbprints across
the gloss, relieved now and then
with a spatter of green slap-
dashed across the chasm
like a smile, and we squalled—
a fracturing rivalry—to claim it.
Mary Beth Hines is a Massachusetts-based writer following a career as a communications and outreach program manager. Her poetry, short fiction and non-fiction appear in journals such as Brilliant Flash Fiction, Crab Orchard Review, Literary Mama, Madcap Review, and SWWIM among many others. Her first full-length poetry collection, Winter at a Summer House, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in late 2021. www.marybethhines.com