Read More: A brief Q&A with Alice Friman
Puddles
for my sister
As if overnight, the flowering pear tree
is flowering. A froth of white.
Birds celebrating, the air silky, the sun
suddenly no longer feeble, the muddy
ground giggling with grass. It was
a day just like this, remember? We were
acting goofy, a brook babbling, and me
in my new hat, ribbons down the back, blue
my favorite color, and you, dead now, but,
oh, you would remember. Where were we?
It was after a big rain, that I know,
and there were puddles, and we were
searching for treasure, but I can’t recall
where we were. Or maybe it wasn’t spring—
the trees bare but for a froth of snow
and we were digging, right? hunting
for something we had lost. Maybe
the oriole we once buried in a hole with
soft grasses and dandelions, poor gold thing.
No, that would mean April at Grandma’s
with no snow or puddles, well not that day
anyhow. Oh, can’t you call it up? After all,
you were the clever one, the older one. Look—
see how the crows are calling from the wires.
They know. Black birds, black birds. Funny
how they always turn up in places like this.
The Elusive Art
I sing of dance, the body’s joy
that fades to memory as soon as
it’s over. Whether leap, arabesque,
arched back flashing in the spotlight,
or you in the privacy of your room—
pirouetting, pointing a toe—there
where no one can see. Just you
and the music wrapped in each-
other’s arms. Making a dance.
I remember Nureyev, how he spun,
the sweat spraying off his body
baptizing the front rows. The fling
of it, the salt of it—proof
of the body’s triumph—each spin,
each leap wrenched from the knot
of himself. And why, but to bestow
beauty, gifting us by his streaming effort
to make the effort sublime. […]
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The Apricot Tree
Kyparassia, Greece, 1977
I’m walking the white-washed steps
winding the hills into town. The odor—
wild thyme and spearmint. And halfway, look,
an apricot tree ablaze with summer, heavy
with fruit. There is a man, of course, green-
eyed Alekos of the red truck, a yaya leading
a donkey, a girlchild, Roola, who hangs on
my neck, begging me to stay. If the journal’s
ink that tells my story has faded, I’ve held it
safe in my head, as if in amber. Only the tree
has grown bigger, bursting its casing—a tree
of nectar and ambrosia where housewives
come to fill their aprons, enough for everybody.
Not like Eden’s tree or Stevens’ palm at the end
of the mind, aloof, beyond us, but part of the daily
juice that is Greece, the dazzle and the dance.
Where’s the file drawer in my brain that holds
the memory of that tree? Behind which eyelid?
Sometimes when I’m tired, I see double. Oh, how
I wish I could conjure duplicates in my dreams
to take me back to those white steps where that tree
stood, double-dropping its sloppy sweetness all over
the ground for the women to come and gather up
in their aprons, take home and make jelly.
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Alice Friman was born and brought up in the heart of New York City. She lived forty-plus years in the midwest, and now lives in Milledgeville Georgia. Her eighth collection of poems is On the Overnight Train, a New & Selected from LSU Press which just won The Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award, 2025. Her previous books, also from LSU, are Blood Weather, The View from Saturn, and Vinculum, which won the Georgia author of the year in poetry. She’s a recipient of many prizes including three from The Poetry Society of America, a Best of the Net award, and two Pushcart Prizes as well as being included in Best American Poetry. Other books include Inverted Fire and The Book of the Rotten Daughter, both from BkMk Press, and Zoo, U of Arkansas Press, which won the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from The New England Poetry Club and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award from Truman State University. She’s been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry East, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review and many others. Her website is alicefrimanpoet.com.
“The Apricot Tree” and “Puddles” were both first published in Plume. “The Elusive Art” was first published in Lake Effect.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Alice Friman