The Shape of Today

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
-Emily Dickinson

Della Eats a Peach without Missing a Word

She rolls a summer peach

in her puffy cream-and-freckle hands
with a firm but gentle squeeze,
fingers for ripeness while the juice
of her stories flows across kitchen table.
Pleased, she pares an unbroken coil
of ruddy skin, sections its gold meat
into dripping wedges, then swallows
them into a stream of syllables,
nectar gurgling in her throat as it
runs into juicy words on their way out.