To a Volunteer Plum
by Paul Watsky
Paul Watsky

Paul Watsky's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Alabama Review, Fugue, The Pinch, Lullwater Review, Poets and Artists: O & S, Natural Bridge, Many Mountains Moving, and others. He has authored two chapbooks issued by tel-let, More Questions Than Answers (2001) and Sea Side (2003). In 2006 he cotranslated Santoka (Tokyo, PIE Books) in collaboration with Emiko Miyashita. In 2010 his debut full-length poetry collection, Telling The Difference, was released by Fisher King Press, and a collection of his baseball poetry entitled Extra Innings was published by Interpoezia. Book critic Dwight Garner referred to his poem "Cumbersome" as "terrific" in his New York Times Arts Beat blog.

A February two-week pretty
phase and then you scraggle into

setting unpalatable
fruit that birds transport

backyard to sidewalk and
splat onto the cement — exploded

fleshgobs, blood, the pallid
pit representing

bone — gross
stigmata that under-

score your ferality. Only my
penny-pinching stewardship has so-far

nullified the carthago
delenda est chanted by one

former landscape gardener, my
wife who despises your

provocations, covets the
land you aggressively

debeautify. $686 and you're
hacked, chipped, out

of here. Her eye's
on you, pal, just like some

whammy's surely got
its judicious eye on me.

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