CRABAPPLES

The cold October trees are red
with fruit they’ve made but don’t need— 
their way of offering is vegetal, slow—
they only show.

I bring them my need
to belong to a place, find something 
there I can work with,
make it mine.

I pluck the recipe for liqueur
from my cell phone:
crabapples, vodka, sugar,
tincture of time.

John, my housecleaner from Cape Breton,
yearly brings me his gift—
the single malt they make back home—
now sniffs and tastes my product,

gives it an A (John wouldn’t
doctor the truth), takes the jar
I give him, the trees’ gift and mine.
We both live alone. 

Steve Nickman’s poetry collection To Sleep with Bears is now available from Wordtech (2022). He is a psychiatrist who works mainly with kids, teenagers and young adults. He has a strong interest in the experiences and dilemmas of adoptees and their families, and is working on a book about therapy, The Wound and the Spark. Steve’s poetry is has recently appeared in Pleiades, Nimrod, Summerset Review, Tar River Review, Tule Review, and JuxtaProse. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and is a member of Poemworks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets.