“Peeling Apples” by Mary Catherine Curley

Julia’s mother had enormous, impossible breasts,
an unsightly mole on her throat. She had changed
her name and refused to tell us what it used to be—
us, and how could we have mattered? A grown
woman, tight-lipped around girls not yet thirteen.
We knew

about the fuzzy caterpillars inching across
the dirt road—about cicadas and crickets and their ocean
of sound—about the apple orchard up the hill
with its sour garbage. We didn’t know about regret
or what mistakes were, didn’t what we would let boys
do to us, how we’d become waiting, lying bodies.
Her mother
could peel apples in one perfect spiral.
The skin fell away in a tight red tendril, re-making
the apple: no flesh, full of air. We begged
her to teach us how, but she wouldn’t. Apples piled
on the counter, white & bruised. The sharp blade
squeezed against her thumb, but no blood.

Mary Catherine Curley grew up in the shadow of a nuclear reactor in Vermont. She received her MFA from Hollins University, where she was a teaching fellow. Her work is forthcoming in Barrelhouse.