Juliana Gray

Lizzie Borden’s Pears

In spring, the smell drove her mad.

Those blossoms, airy as lace, stank

of fish and rot and something else;


she’d heard the neighbor boys snicker,

passing by.  She locked the casements

until the white petals browned


and fell, displaced by hard, ungrateful fruits.

Then, the days were hot.  She raised

her bedroom windows, prayed for breeze.


That air, impossible to breathe–

she could find no relief from it.

The ripened pears dropped to earth.


At night, their thuds brought restless dreams 

of strange men lurking in the yard.

She woke each morning drenched in sweat.


She was often ill that summer.

Everyone was ill.  The meat

went bad in a day, cakes turned sour,


her parents retched their dinners at night,

then breakfasted on leftovers.

That morning, Lizzie could not eat,


could not abide even the smell

of johnnycakes and mutton stew.

She fled into the barn loft,


taking an apron full of pears.

There, she said, she sat and ate

for twenty or thirty minutes– she wolfed


her alibi pears to the cores.

Perhaps she thought of Saint Augustine,

who in his youth stole his neighbor’s pears,


not for joy or hunger, but merely sin.

Inside the house, the air had changed.

Smell of iron.  Soft grains.



“Lizzie Borden’s Pears” first appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review and is from Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press, 2017).