Plums
   by Anne Britting Oleson Anne Britting Oleson

Anne Britting Oleson has been published widely on four continents. She earned her MFA at the Stonecoast program of USM. She has published two chapbooks, The Church of St. Materiana (2007) and The Beauty of It (2010). A third chapbook, Planes and Trains and Automobiles, is forthcoming from Portent Press (UK), and a novel, The Book of the Mandolin Player, is forthcoming from B Ink Publishing—both in the fall of 2015.

On the road to hospice
somewhere outside Hereford.
A side road. Tiny farm stand
with a single-word sign: plums.
Two paper baskets left next to
a trusting box: two quid.
Inside, purple nestled eggs
mound and settle.
You choose, hold the basket
in your hands like an offering,
to the unsettled sky, to hold off rain.
To the god of elderly parents,
to let an old man taste summer
once more before the leaves fall
and winter settles in.



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