Maybe you hold it like a fruit

so bright you don’t get to return it.
Hold the abundance gently—

the news that she’s entered recovery,
or the conversation about young grief,

or the feeling of his cry balanced
right there, as if on the waterline,

waiting. And he is too, the man
wondering how to go about days

like normal. He’s outside
in his golden California garden,

tending to plums, ferns, and rose.
But the most beautiful thing—

the lemon tree, he salvaged
from trash and replanted,

right there by the fence,
now bears endless yellow.

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Gwenyth Wheat (she/her), nominee for Best New Poets 2024, is currently earning her MFA and MA at McNeese State University. Her work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in Poetry and has appeared in Great Lakes Review, The Poet’s Touchstone, Voicemail Poems, ZAUM, and elsewhere. She is a writing instructor and the Poetry Editor for The McNeese Review.