Pear

What’s green canteen of effervescent water?
Vessel of white fibers churning into sugar
In the grinder of the mouth, pouch of
Floral mush? Green mixed tint of
Your grandmother’s yellow teeth?
Yellow of forsythia shrubs a flash,
Green beam swimming in sunlight,
Smooth skin thinly wraps crunch?
Radish-kin, jicama-cousin. You bite
Into its hips like a good chocolate bar,
Work your sweet mastication down
To its music box ballerina stem &
Woodsy core where its seeds live,
Hibernating pear-baby hearts.

Apple

As I was biting into the apple,
a fearful fruit worm popped
out, shivering & pleading,
Don’t eat me! I considered
sparing rhagoletis pomonella,
maggot-lunch-interruptus,
but I could use the protein,
insects being the new surge
of a brave epicurean future.
Who am I to defy progress?
I readied to chomp & devour
when flashed a sudden bright
Christ & the fat, luscious larvae
transformed into an airborne fly.

Sunday Aubade

Maple syrup poured over Greek yogurt, walnuts
sprinkled like petrified miniature
lungs, light-brown,

or brains, aerial viewed: my early-eyed sustenance
on a cloudy break-of-day: silence
grown out of departed

shadows: the green couch like a garden
wild with rectangular topiaries:
bitter tea tempered

with milk, verging on expiration, I sip
daintily as the sky-blue wash
of the walls

cascades, as I slipped feline under a throw:
time seemed stilled, yet
I live in it,

porous construct of an appearance of a life
where you appear through
an unseen door

into my room, bedsheet-and-pillow creases
on your morning face, lips
of a bygone era.

*

Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and NYFA fellow, authored the poetry collections Amphibian (forthcoming, April 2026), Threshold, and Imago; and the chapbooks Postcards; Aviary, Bestiary, and Subways. He works at Columbia University, teaches at Fordham University, and resides with his husband in Jackson Heights, Queens.