applesauce1
Sugar
by Barbara Crooker

My mother is a hungry ghost. She comes to me in dreams,
asking, where’s the applesauce? The kind you make?
Cooked with the skins on, whirled with cinnamon
and nutmeg, swirled through a food mill, smooth fruit
separated from skins, cores, seeds. Shouldn’t this sweetness
exist in the afterlife? Yet I’ve heard that’s what angels crave
those times they’re glimpsed, partly visible, a rustle of wings,
an opening in the air. Apparently, they shimmer,
made of gossamer and light. We always long
for what we don’t have, and they yearn to be incarnate,
to know the hunger of the tongue. Filaments of cotton candy,
fistfuls of sugar, the long slow drip of honey and molasses.
I tried to sweeten my mother’s last days, bringing
her a deconstructed sundae—coffee ice cream in one cup,
hot fudge in another, whipped cream in a third. But her hunger
is not appeased. She still longs for this world, its confectionary
splendor. She would, if she could, open her mouth
like a bird or a baby, and let me spoon it in.

PHOTO: Apple sauce by Margouillat.

SOURCE: Featured in the author’s collection, Gold (Cascade Books, 2013).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: “Sugar” is from a collection of grief poems about losing my mother. Food is very important in my family, a way of keeping us all connected. And applesauce without these seasonings just wouldn’t be the same.

Crooker

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Crooker is the author of nine full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), which was long-listed for the Julie Suk award. Radiance, her first book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature; and The Book of Kells won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Writing by the Sea. Her writing has received a number of awards, including the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and The Bedford Introduction to Literature.  She has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Moulin à Nef (Auvillar, France), and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Annaghmakerrig, Ireland). Garrison Keillor has read her poems over 60 times on The Writer’s Almanac, and she has read her poetry all over the country, including The Festival of Faith and Writing,  Poetry @ Roundtop, The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival,  Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium, and the Library of Congress.