by Jane Rosenberg LaForge
My mother believed in the transformative
power of lemons. In the produce section
of the Food Giant, she rolled them between
her fingers like rude jewels, ostentatious
with vitamins. Lemons cleaned. They shined.
They fought infections. How lemons came
to the New World, after they put down
pogroms: Warrior lemons swam across
the Atlantic, transplanted themselves
in favorable conditions. They were come-uppance
for Jew-haters and other bums.
No human ever truly possesses a lemon.
One merely borrows its force on occasion.
They are not beheld so much as balanced
between the palms, like a raft of light hurled down
by authorities of biblical proportions.
In our yard, our mother planted lemon trees
as if they were totems, calendars, lost coats of arms.
Lemons would preserve and protect us. In her dreams
she counted lemons as though they were gold
bars harvested from sacred mines in the Andes.
When the trees did not flower, we were told
lemons had no adolescence. They emerged
fully-formed, swollen and bracing like lips
preparing insults. Our great bombs of citrus
would blind pests, neuter enemies, dispatch
the neighbors with their armies of Mexican
workers to douse their cars, excavate their pools,
mind their gardens. When our trees remained bare
through summer our mother grafted their branches
with stuffed animals, tigers and lions.
We danced around our feckless lemon trees
as if they were May poles, took black and white
snapshots with an Instamatic. Our crop would never
suffer frost, turn mildewed, go rancid. For our mother
the stuffed animals were harvest enough,
like the rats living in neighbors’ palm trees,
disguising themselves as coconuts.