Kate Lebo is the author of Pie School and A Commonplace Book of Pie, and co-editor with Sam Ligon of the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. Her writing has been anthologized in Best American Essays, Best New Poets, This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, and Ghosts of Seattle Past. Her first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
In the Beginning
Shame was a fruit we did not recognize
and attempted to catalog by eating
I remember
it was dusk
Dinnertime
We took our bodies with us when we ran
He called our absence
like he could call cold mud to life
like he had done that before
We are dirt
we now knew
and happy
are the hands that steal
You are the fist our bellies made
at their first missed meal