i.
Once only I ate avocado that made me understand why I should have
Been born in California, made me understand Minnesotans
Who keep trying, putting up with yellowish-bland or brown-stringed, no
I never until this winter on vacation ate perfect
Avocado until my soup arrived with a generous pile
Of avocado slices on the side as if photoshopped
Intended to be added to the soup to taste. “Really?” We still
Cold Minnesotans, asked. “Yeah,” the server answered, “Supernormal.”
Even so, I could not spend such extravagance. I ate mine plain.
That avocado tasted like the grounded expansiveness of
Lying in a swatch of sun in the middle of a just-cleaned floor.
ii.
Now the spring peepers, Pseudacris crucifer, cross-carriers,
Nocturnal as a rule, as if charged, they to themselves, all day
An inconspicuous constellation rupturing, fidget, ring
Like all our skates on thin ice, like our dallying fingers rimming
Our crystal stemware. Called up by the Defense Production Act of
A greater government, the spring peepers churn out a Green New Deal.
iii.
After cutting and working against the snug whole,
Two halves of an avocado are never equal
iv.
How we are living now merely overlays the normal
Like the math teacher’s transparency placed on the overhead projector
There on the screen, the exaggerated ratios:
Adjust the focus.
The taking from the x-side of the indivisible
liberty
justice
for all
=
to give to the accumulating side
until the isolated x there can be replaced entirely by the wealth here.
v.
Let the avocado be the standard of our supernormal time
Leading twin crucifers chanting
Who labors under what conditions to bring me avocados?
And What harm is done to the Earth to make
Commercially farmed avocados profitable?
vi.
Earth says, “You be Earth.”
She constructs obstacles –
Cement, glass, plastic,
Legislations, toxins –
In all our connective pathways.
She diminishes our lungs of forests.
Asks, “Do you need me?”
vii.
How we pluck ideas, green nascent fruit, before ripened tender
Carry them day to night to day
“See how easily I disregard you” is a hard avocado
viii.
On this May Day while the peepers manufacture life
The retired math teacher, who never waves to his neighbors
Because he cannot see them, angles out through the patio door onto the deck
His deceased wife’s avocado tree, which she brought forth
From the pit of a gift from her sister in California.
This poem first appeared in All You Need Is One Avocado (2023).
—
Books by Su Love include Weight of Light, nominated for the Pushcart Editors’ Book Prize, and Buddha, Proof, a Minnesota Book Award finalist. Su’s sixth book concerns legacies of nuclear power in Minnesota and is supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, and St. Croix Watershed Research Station. Su has been a visiting writer at several colleges, universities and organizations including Salmon Literary Centre, Ireland, and American Space Madrid/Instituto Internacional. sulove.org.
