Your Homegrown Smile

is delicious. It’s
bright and round like cherry
tomatoes pulled
from a soil bed.

Gripped by two
hands, with white chalk
lined canals running across the
palms, the flowering green, sea monster
shaped stems sprout
around fingernails, and
hair on the wrists of
a sunburned forearm. 

When I think about your
smile, I think about home.
The rain on my family farm,
all season long it rains.

I think about the dirt from
the ruby-like bulbs, shedding
there Guajilo Adobe past. 

Your smile starts in the same
soil. A rich, deep 
goldbar squash color. 

And everything that grows
in your smile is picked, 
doubled washed,
hand- delivered; it uncovers 
the edges, slightly charred, 
behind a sun-kissed sweetness.

Earthy, field fresh, sweetly tangy, 
exploding in your mouth. 

George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, the Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, essays and letters have appeared in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Havana Times, the South China Morning Post, the Buffalo News, and more. 

See all his poems on Tea House here.