by Michael Pittard

next to me peeling
my pear with his
bitten fingernails
the flesh receding
at his gentle touch

The saint plans on
staying perhaps
until the midnight
stars & the cratered
moon slip away

It is a hard thing
letting another eat
what I earned
for a day’s labor
a tensed muscle

I could rest beside
him on this stone
bench with doves
cooing among the
dark boxwoods—

Ask me to wait
he says & we can
sit for a lifetime
til the grass turns
brown at our feet

Michael Pittard is an English lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has an MFA in poetry from UNCG and is a former poetry editor of The Greensboro Review. His poems have appeared in The Bookends Review, Red Flag Poetry and Poetry South. His criticism has been published in Chicago Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, and storySouth. He lives with his wife and their cat Roosevelt, in Greensboro, NC.