Food Poetry: Walnut, by Kim Roberts

WALNUT

A withered heart
cupped in a tough cardboard membrane
inside a mahogany crate
packed like a precious sculpture
loaned to another museum
where we curators, critics all,
pry them open with crude levers.
The heart looks so unpromising and sere,
but in the chamber of our mouths,
with only a touch of bitterness,
it opens black exotic blooms.

____________________

Kim Roberts is the editor of the acclaimed on-line journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  She is author of three books of poetry, Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions, 2011), The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press, 2007), and The Wishbone Galaxy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1994), and author of the nonfiction chapbook Lip Smack: A History of Spoken Word Poetry in DC (Beltway Editions, 2010). In addition, she edited the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems about Washington, DC (Plan B Press, 2010). Her poems appear in numerous anthologies and have been translated into Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Mandarin.