A crate of peaches straight from the farm
has to be maintained, or eaten in days.
Obvious, but in my family, they went so fast,
I never saw the mess that punishes delay.

I thought everyone bought fruit by the crate,
stored it in the coolest part of the house,
then devoured it before any could rot.
I'm from the Peach State, and to those

who ask But where are you from originally,
I'd like to reply The homeland of the peach,
but I'm too nice, and they might not look it up.
In truth, the reason we bought so much

did have to do with being Chinese-at least
Chinese in that part of America, both strangers
and natives on a lonely, beautiful street
where food came in stackable containers

and fussy bags, unless you bothered to drive
to the source, where the same money landed
a bushel of fruit, a twenty-pound sack of rice.
You had to drive anyway, each house surrounded

by land enough to grow your own, if lawns
hadn't been required. At home I loved to stare
into the extra freezer, reviewing mountains
of foil-wrapped meats, cakes, juice concentrate,

mysterious packets brought by house guests
from New York Chinatown, to be transformed
by heat, force, and my mother's patient effort,
enough to keep us fed through flood or storm,


provided the power stayed on, or fire and ice
could be procured, which would be labor-intensive,
but so was everything else my parents did.
Their lives were labor, they kept this from the kids,

who grew up to confuse work with pleasure,
to become typical immigrants' children,
taller than their parents and unaware of hunger
except when asked the odd, perplexing question.



About this poem
"When I started this poem, I had bought a crate of local peaches and managed to eat or can most of them but reached exhaustion before the bottom of the crate. About a dozen enormous peaches remained, threatening to rot. Why, I asked myself, do I buy so many at a time?"
-Adrienne Su

About Adrienne Su
Adrienne Su is the author of "Living Quarters" (Manic D Press, 2015). She teaches at Dickinson College and lives in Carlisle, Penn.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Adrienne Su. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate