The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness

Every embryo curls like a cashew nut.
Every cashew nut hangs from its red strange apple,
drops from its drupe with the thin-lipped

leering look of a devil.
Every devil, like the cashew, has smooth skin
like an old man’s chinos. An old man hunches

over a cart in the Stop & Shop
looking for yesterday’s Sara Lee
all by himself because his wife is dead or

confused. The wife
curls into herself, her back curved, her hands
curved, too, into her breast bone. She’s small now,

a newborn, translucent and apart. The skin
of every cashew is toxic. When roasted the smoke
burns the pink lung layers right off —

sometimes I think: when I pull all sadness from my sternum
it will be a cut-glass bowl I’ll put out for company.

ξ

“The Cashew is the Nut of All Sadness" was first published in The Sycamore Review.

Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review.

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