Packing Lunch

My mother clinched to sliced apples
Diced with lemon juice
As if they were a life preserver.
It’s Monday morning
And the sun’s setting
Behind stained windows,
PB&J fingers.
Dinosaur shaped breads look most
Fantasmic
When you’re half-asleep,
Crust still a sty in your left tear duct,
A cork for the years ahead of you.
Mother puts a silver,
Glistening silver,
Bag of smiley fruit gummies
In the lunchbox and closes the lid,
A Yoohoo! poking his head out from behind
A turtleneck.
The food tastes best when there’s a note
On the lunchbox floor:
XOXO, Mom.
I often got lost in the diameter of
The O’s,
The X’s arms being wrapped around me.
Never letting go.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I’m five years old.
It’s my first day of school.
My little body is sitting on a cafeteria
Seat two-times the size of me.
I didn’t make friends easily.
I open the lunch pale and inhale
A deep whiff of home .
Hugs.
Tears.
Thirty years from now
I’ll be sitting at a lunch table
On the other side of the world.
Inhaling.
Waiting for the scent.
Inhaling.