Attachment Theory

I emerged from tidy rows. Mouth sticking clear with juice.

No sign of the rusted old blue Buick. No parents,

nor cousins carrying cheerful totes bulging with their pickings.

Not all stories end this way: my mother realizing her oversight,

hurrying teary-eyed to harvest me from where I waited,

apple in hand, crushing cyanide and sugar tucked inside each seed

between my teeth, convinced they weren’t coming back. Of course

I thought that. A child’s fear predictable as an orchard in the autumn.

Some things, just easy to forget. Back home, I was unscathed, they'd say:

a stomach ache and nothing more. But it wasn’t the first time I’d been left.

Years later, a therapist will say: children relinquished early on relive

the memory of that loss. I am that child. Standing alone in a field,

the road  stretching empty, flies snapping ankles, unseasonable September

sweating my neck. And the latent loss, seeping out. Sweet as poison from a pip.