<\/p>\n
Temptation<\/strong><\/p>\n I brought an apple to my teacher at <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gale Acuff<\/strong> has had poetry published in Ascent, McNeese Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Poem, Adirondack Review, Weber: The Contemporary West, Maryland Poetry Review, Florida Review, South Carolina Review, Carolina Quarterly, Arkansas Review, South Dakota Review, Orbis<\/em>, and many other journals. He has authored three books of poetry: Buffalo Nickel<\/em> (BrickHouse Press, 2004), The Weight of the World<\/em> (BrickHouse, 2006), and The Story of My Lives<\/em> (BrickHouse, 2008). \u00a0Gale has taught university English in the US, China, and the Palestinian West Bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Temptation I brought an apple to my teacher at Sunday School, Miss Hooker. I kept it in my jacket pocket until after class so none of the other kids could see me give it to her after the lesson. It weighed me down a little on one side, my left side, where I stowed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16185"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16464,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16185\/revisions\/16464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSunday School, Miss Hooker. I kept it in
\nmy jacket pocket until after class
\nso none of the other kids could see me
\ngive it to her after the lesson. It
\nweighed me down a little on one side, my
\nleft side, where I stowed it, close to my heart,
\nor closer, at least than my right pocket
\nand there’s not much room in it, anyway,
\nwhat with my penknife and chewing gum and
\na napkin left over from Burger King
\nand a couple of acorns, big ones, with
\nlittle caps on them, hope they don’t fall off,
\nand a key that I found that fits a door
\nand whoever lost it, I hope he’s got
\na spare. Or she. And twenty-seven cents
\nin mostly pennies. It’s a big apple
\nto make me favor my left side against
\na pretty hefty sum in my right, and
\nred, and red’s a color that looks heavy
\nto me, and a stem so thick you could write
\nwith it, almost, and even two leaves big
\nenough to cover Adam and Eve
\ndown there where you’re not supposed to see them
\nuntil you’remarried, I guess, maybe
\nold enough to look at people naked,
\nwhatever age that is–16 maybe.
\nI’m just 9 so I have, let’s see, seven
\nmore years to see what a woman looks like
\nunderneath unless I find out through some
\nsin, though I admit I’ve checked the World Book
\nEncyclopedia but those pictures
\nare of the insides of people, women and
\nmen, and I don’t care to see into things
\nso true. If I had Superman’s X-ray
\nvision I might use it to look through walls
\nor clothes but only once or twice to see
\nif it’s working. Any more and I’ve sinned
\nand I don’t want to go to Hell, even
\nif I get to wait ’til after I die.
\nIt wasn’t easy, walking up to her,
\nMiss Hooker I mean, with my present, and
\nnot just because I could get it barely
\nout of my pocket, it was so big and
\nfelt even bigger, as if it had grown
\ninside me, maybe like a baby if
\nthat’s where they come from, inside a woman
\nI mean, not a pocket. And I dropped it
\nalmost, but caught at it with both hands. Whew.
\nMiss Hooker had her back turned, erasing
\nthe board. I stood behind her, cleared my throat,
\nand must have surprised her because she whirled
\nto me and cried Oh! I held it to her
\nwith both hands and said, Miss Hooker, I brought
\nyou this apple and I hope you like it.
\nWhy thank you, Gale, she squealed. That was too kind.
\nWhen she took it from me, with her left hand,
\nwhich is, as we know, the one nearest our
\nheart, some of her fingertips touched mine, or
\nsome of them, and I can tell you which ones,
\nshe held it toward the light in the east
\nwindow and said, I don’t think I’ve ever
\nseen a finer specimen. No, I said,
\nit’s an apple. She laughed and her laughter
\nmade it sound as though there was no such thing
\nas sin, at least in our little classroom,
\nor that if there was we’d still have no fear.
\nAnd when I pulled the knife from my pocket
\nand offered to cut her a slice of it
\nshe said, No, I’ll just eat it as it is,
\nand brushed it against her chests a few strokes
\nand then bit right into it as if I
\ndidn’t want a piece myself, and wasn’t
\nhungry, and didn’t want to share the pain.<\/p>\n