Because We Have Never Been Monkeys, Porch or Otherwise
~With thanks to Camille Dungy
We had no porch, so we ate our watermelon at the kitchen table.
We sliced it—those green glowing orbs sat so loudly on tables and truckbeds
at the farmer’s market, that market we visited almost always
before continuing to Bessemer to see Grandma Ola— ----
we sliced it up into wedges or halves, or fleshy red hunks, and
Mom sprinkled it, always, with salt. Salt made that too-fresh, too-water, too-ripe melon pop—
salt sucked off the seeds we spit into piles on the table—
seeds we imagined might grow more melons if we dropped them in Dad’s backyard garden,
and which never quite grew in that garden where it seemed everything could grow—
even if they sprouted, those melons would never balloon and make good fruit.
Although I never liked watermelon—even now, it sometimes makes me gag,
sometimes a swish caught in the throat.
Although I didn’t perk up at the green, green skin, I still ate it,
greedily,
just to be able to smile
with my mother, who loves it so well.
Just to catch that salty glint in her eye and call it my own.
We sliced it—those green glowing orbs sat so loudly on tables and truckbeds
at the farmer’s market, that market we visited almost always
before continuing to Bessemer to see Grandma Ola— ----
we sliced it up into wedges or halves, or fleshy red hunks, and
Mom sprinkled it, always, with salt. Salt made that too-fresh, too-water, too-ripe melon pop—
salt sucked off the seeds we spit into piles on the table—
seeds we imagined might grow more melons if we dropped them in Dad’s backyard garden,
and which never quite grew in that garden where it seemed everything could grow—
even if they sprouted, those melons would never balloon and make good fruit.
Although I never liked watermelon—even now, it sometimes makes me gag,
sometimes a swish caught in the throat.
Although I didn’t perk up at the green, green skin, I still ate it,
greedily,
just to be able to smile
with my mother, who loves it so well.
Just to catch that salty glint in her eye and call it my own.
Ashley M. Jones holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, co-directs PEN Birmingham, and is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.
Art: Watermelon, Citrullus Vulgaris, Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt. Public Domain