fieryphoenix
Sweets
by Wendy Stewart

For Christmas we make marzipan fruits.
They are as big as my thumbs.

Apples are round and red,
like apples. I get it.

Plums are purple like plums.
I like them best.
Bananas are yellow and long.

I say grapes and she laughs.
I get it. They’d be so little.

Once she says Oh! That one
I thought must be a real plum.

She puts them on the glass tray.
They stay set on the cold porch.

When company comes,
we offer them our candies.
She holds the tray.

I tell how my mum
was fooled by my plum:
That one.

PHOTO: Marzipan fruits by Fiery Phoenix.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote “Sweets” when my daughter was little, perhaps littler than I was in this poem, and I was missing my mother. It is a fond memory. It struck me that you don’t know what’s going to stick with a person all their lives, or how what sticks can encourage them—or not—in ways you can’t foresee.

Stewart1

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from Canada, since 2007 Wendy Stewart has made her home in New York State. She’s published poems, creative nonfiction, essays, humor, and artwork in Our Voices, ragazine.cc, San Pedro River Review, and The Afterlife of Discarded Objects, a digital collective story-telling project and book.