What do you want in retirement,
I’m asked over dinner out with friends.
A boisterous kid at another table
goes silent when served gelato
she’s demanded all evening. She fixes
on the treat, carnally absorbed by each mouthful.
That, I answer my friends, eyeing the girl relishing
whatever is served up —
but in her shrinking
sundae, now a gouged
scoop slumping
in her bowl, I see
in its captive crouch
what I may have to swallow,
my need for a feral
stomach for fallen
fruit or a rotted
bird, foraging
like a bony beast
as fugitive
as that ice cream,
vanishing
spoonful by
spoonful
into
open jaws.
Click here to read Lily Jarman-Reisch on the origin of the poem.
Image: Gelato by Pug Girl, licensed under CC 2.0.
Lily Jarman-Reisch's poems appear or are forthcoming in CALYX, Collateral, 3rd Wednesday, Fourth River, Gleam, Journal of Veteran's Studies, Last Stanza, Light, Mediterranean Poetry, Mobius, One, Pangyrus, Plainsongs, Rise Up Review, Route 7 Review, Slant Poetry, Snapdragon, 1807, The Dewdrop, The Military Review, MONO, and other international literary journals. A 2023 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, she is a poetry reviewer for The Los Angeles Review. She was a journalist in Washington, D.C., and Athens, Greece, where she lived aboard a small boat she sailed throughout the Aegean and Ionian. She has also held administrative and teaching positions at the Universities of Michigan and Maryland, sailed across the Atlantic, and hiked on four continents.