Appetizers
It is the end of the year celebration,
picnic day for faculty and families,
a potluck at the dean's home.
The chemist brings wine and sodas,
the microbiologist provides home-made
sour-dough rolls and butter.
The dean supplies hot dogs and hamburgers,
the physicist, stationed at the barbeque
cooks the meat to suit the preference of each guest.
The botanist serves green salad
with blue cheese dressing,
and the geologist presents the dessert,
a chocolate marble cake.
It is the biologist that passes a plate
of deep-fried mystery morsels, the appetizers.
With a twinkle in her eye, she begins serving them,
first to the dean of the department
who eagerly swoops three of them onto his plate.
After a couple of bites, he finds the appetizers chewy,
but battered and deep fried they please his palate.
Then he asks "Are these appetizers oysters?
The biologist smiled saying, "Yes, mountain oysters,
we have been castrating calves all day,
we didn't want them to go to waste."
Everyone laughs and at the biologist's chutzpah,
feeding testicles to her boss.
The dean asks for seconds.
2nd Prize, CFCP Annual Poetry Contest, May 2023
Pomegranates, It's A Process
On the cusp of pomegranate season
burnished crimson globes weigh heavy on the bush,
their arils inside, not yet a rich burgundy color.
When ready, you and I collect them,
eviscerate them one red aril jewel at a time,
squeeze from them their dark tart juice.
After that, you swirl your magic
with their filtered nectar and transform it into jelly -
clear, ruby red, transparent.
But not this year.
You are no longer here to help
no longer available to participate
in the rosary of pomegranate processing.
Your hands will not flash through ripe fruits
cracked open by rain and damp air
offering themselves to the harvest.
This year we won't season the process
with our quilting-bee-like conversation
and instead, you will be absent.
Alone, I will spend hours of tedium,
picking out arils, my mood vacillating
between mechanical meditation and melancholy.
And when the season ends, my hands stained black,
solo, I will finish my part of the process,
an ambush of tears at the ready.
Lynn M. Hansen is a retired Modesto Junior College professor of marine biology. A member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle, Orinda, CA, MoSt Poetry Center, Modesto and National League of American Pen Women, Modesto Branch, her work reflects her sense of place and art of story-telling. She enjoys gardening with native plants, photography, cooking and writing. With her husband Richard Anderson she has traveled to all seven continents and enjoys adventures in different cultural realms. Her publications include a collection of her poems published by Quercus Review Press entitled Flicker, Poems by Lynn M. Hansen (2013), an historical novel about her maternal grandmother entitled The Journey to Sky Avenue, The Life of Mernie Daisy Lewis 1882-1963 (self-published 2021) a second collection of poetry, In the Presence of the Moai: Poetry and Prose of Travel with Pen Women Press (2023).
