The Banana
If you don’t eat it for lunch, you get it for dinner
was the rule of my childhood, followed by
if you don’t eat it for dinner, you get it for breakfast,
and it probably won’t surprise you to know what happened
if said leftover breakfast was sullenly skipped.
There were other rules, sure, like tie your shoes
and don’t swallow your gum and we only pee outside
in the woods, not at school and don’t masturbate
except with the door closed and always knock if a door’s closed
unless you’re a parent for whom rules don’t apply
and don’t lie, but I was a good kid; I tried my doggone best
to obey the rules, especially the one about honesty; so when,
decades later, at a continental buffet in a Holiday Inn
on a road trip with my mom, I poked at the liver spots
on the banana in the fruit bowl and wrinkled my nose,
and she said, “I’ve never understood why you didn’t simply
throw the bananas in your school lunch away and lie?
That’s what I would have done,”
a door in my brain slammed so hard it shook
my shoelaces, and I would have swallowed my gum
if I wasn’t afraid of how it might haunt me,
what a broken rule might mean.
Kent Leatham’s poems and translations have appeared in dozens of journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Softblow, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University, served as an associate poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay.
If you don’t eat it for lunch, you get it for dinner
was the rule of my childhood, followed by
if you don’t eat it for dinner, you get it for breakfast,
and it probably won’t surprise you to know what happened
if said leftover breakfast was sullenly skipped.
There were other rules, sure, like tie your shoes
and don’t swallow your gum and we only pee outside
in the woods, not at school and don’t masturbate
except with the door closed and always knock if a door’s closed
unless you’re a parent for whom rules don’t apply
and don’t lie, but I was a good kid; I tried my doggone best
to obey the rules, especially the one about honesty; so when,
decades later, at a continental buffet in a Holiday Inn
on a road trip with my mom, I poked at the liver spots
on the banana in the fruit bowl and wrinkled my nose,
and she said, “I’ve never understood why you didn’t simply
throw the bananas in your school lunch away and lie?
That’s what I would have done,”
a door in my brain slammed so hard it shook
my shoelaces, and I would have swallowed my gum
if I wasn’t afraid of how it might haunt me,
what a broken rule might mean.
Kent Leatham’s poems and translations have appeared in dozens of journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Softblow, Able Muse, and Poetry Quarterly. He received an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Pacific Lutheran University, served as an associate poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay.
