Hello readers! Every week, the BOA staff shares one of our favorite poems from our over 300 collections of poetry. This week's poem is from Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis, winner of the 13th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.

Farmer's Market Sweet Plums: Apology to the Flower Lady

We have no issue with her, per se. Guilty,
we knew already what we wanted
long before we noticed the slow gesture
of her fingers: flower to scissors, to vase,
to flower again. Her painful carefulness—:
that anonymous labor for more

beauty qua beauty. She almost convinces us
to forget the fruit and choose the flower
in her hands:—to take from her
that burden of belief. Leaving the market,
with bags of plums bumping at our hips, we begin
to offer strangers that rounded sweetness,

one by one, desperate for her gentleness,
for her certainty in what the living need.