Poetry doesn’t have to be about much. 

My students don’t believe me, 

or they’re too bored to believe, 

so I’m telling them about bananas 

and how one day they’ll be in a store 

and see some perfect in their hypnotic yellow, 

lounging on the green display plastic, yellow fingers 

of a yellow hand curling, palms up, towards them, 

and they’ll think, “Wow, those are beautiful bananas.” 

That’s not the poetry yet, I tell them—the poetry comes 

when you wonder, When in the hell did I become this person,

this man in a Giant judging bananas? 

You’ll trace the moment to the minute your first child arrived

and you began seeing the world 

as deadly and benign, 

as poison and fuel, 

as pathways to grief and pathways to tenuous, leveraged joy.

Those bananas want me to want my children to eat them, 

and in the calling between fruit and father, 

we’ll find what we’re after.