Dear
I saw Mick Jagger once
with his girlfriend at a café two tables away
from where my mother and I were eating lunch.
“Mick Jagger!” I blurted under my breath,
as if I’d just arrived from the sea floor.
My mother was eating a wedge of cantaloupe
in her manner—
first, the silver knife under the flesh,
but leaving the severed pieces to rest
in place on the rind, then
a series of precise vertical cuts,
rhombus chunks of melon
a small clutch of passengers
shoulder to shoulder in the boat of rind.
I told my mother I’d secretly taken a cellphone picture
of Mick and his girlfriend
and felt bad about being so selfish.
Not selfish on purpose, mother said,
but I replied, Yes, on purpose.
But not really meaning to be selfish, she said,
but me saying, Yes, I was,
until she said, We are not selfish, dear.
Bio:
Peter Schireson divides his time between California and New York. His poems have been published in Post Road, Quiddity, Hotel Amerika, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pleiades, and other journals. His chapbook – “The Welter of Me & You” – won the Coal Hill 2013 Chapbook Prize.