In a certain year, a late year, this year,
I have suddenly become allergic to cherries.
I have enjoyed cherries all of my life.
Now they are in season,
cheap in the grocery store,
and I have been wolfing cherries down.
There is a process to eating a cherry. Six stages.
The stem pick-up out of the bowl,
the placement behind the teeth,
the stem-pull and discard,
the careful chew around the stone hard pit,
the pulp juice squish gurgitated to the pit of your life.
And best of all, the socially acceptable indelicacy of the spit,
surreptitiously, if possible, disguised in a white napkin,
or if outdoors, the pneumatic and muscular seed blast.
But now, after all these years of being passive and delicious,
these harmless drupes fight back with a systemic malic acid attack.
I break out. I blotch. I itch. Welts, fingernail scratch wounds,
the whole unwelcome irritation of a lovely flowered fruit
and the late bloom search for another earthly pleasure.