Carling McManus is a poet whose work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Meridian, Best New Poets, and The Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives on a mountainside with her wife and two border collies in Mink Shoals, WV.

Poetry winner of the 2021 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by guest judge Jihyun Yun.

From the market we buy Early Girl
tomato plants, pre-caged in plastic
pots, labeled Patio Ready. We set
them on the south side of the house,
beyond the eaves to reach the rain.
We tell each other that our lives
have grown too full to tend a garden,
that too much has happened since
the last summer when we started
from seed, that this abundance
of sunlight and sky deserves a shot
at even small, hard-fleshed fruit.
A friend calls to say she’s due
for surgery soon, to remove a tumor
from her uterus. She was prepping
for pregnancy and felt something
foreign forming. The surgeon held
up two cupped hands and said,
“Picture a softball or a grapefruit.”
She settled on a grapefruit, if only
to honor her body’s ability to bear
something living, even these bitter
cells that only know how to grow.

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