KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Penny Perry
VANILLA
We sit in little classroom chairs
this late winter evening.
Carolina, so pretty in a pink
sweatshirt. Carolina has been
in this valley only one month.
Naomi, Another beauty.
I’ve known for years.
One heel on her shoe built high
to disguise the uneven length
of her legs. Her family in Mexico
too poor to correct her club foot.
Macaela, fast- talking, plump,
the critic, bites a cookie, wags
her finger at me. “Good. But
needs more sugar, more vanilla.”
I can’t afford real vanilla
and ran out of the artificial
flavor I had left. I bring oatmeal
cookies each week. My offering
for my students.
My students get up before
sunlight plant cuttings in pots,
stoop under hot sun to pull
weeds, then come to class
to learn how to help their children.
Naomi says she misses
her rancho village in Mexico,
the light yellow flowers,
the scent of vanilla
from the climbing vines.
“A boy called my daughter
a wet back, a criminal,”
Carolina says. Macaela hands
Carolina a cookie. Outside
a sudden spatter of rain.
We all lean closer together.
ALONE ON A WINTER NIGHT
Dark before five.
My husband late.
No moon.
I fill the cloth bag
with oak limbs
that once shaded our house.
His supper getting cold,
I listen for the soft sweep
of shoes on our path.
In the house,
I feed the wood stove
kindling
wrapped in today’s news.
An overture
of flames.
Like anxious concert-goers
hurrying to seats,
field mice, wintering indoors,
scramble in the attic.
The thin violins
of twigs
rise and fade.
Warm now,
I sip green tea.
Our old oak
sings a capella.
The Tree of White Peaches
My grandmother
and I,
like two wily alley cats,
not sure why they survived,
filled paper bags
with pink skinned,
fleshy white fruit.
Each spring, the tree of white
peaches grew fat with leaves
and fruit.
On summer nights,
we sat in wicker chairs.
spooning peaches
and cream,
our empty house settling
behind us.
The tree, gnarled, top-heavy,
like her. She’d cry to white
blossoms: you came back
to life.
Her daughters with their page-
boys, literary books,and dim
husbands still dead.
Penny Perry is a five time Pushcart nominee, her fiction has appeared in Redbook, California Quarterly, Passager, Thema, Lynx Eye, The Bridge and other print journals, and online at Literary Mama, and Excuse Me I'm Writing. Garden Oak Press published her first collection of poetry, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage.