The Basket of Apples, by Jennifer Badot

The Basket of Apples, by Paul Cézanne (France) 1893

The Basket of Apples 

What I knew of Cezanne: that he was from France, the country of our father, and a still life that hung in a blue frame in our kitchen beside the telephone, its coiled cord hanging down, a goldilocks curl. Those sweet, burnished apples couldn’t have been further from our truth, though flaxen highlights matched the colour of our walls, and shadows under the radiator were the same blackened green as the wine bottle leaning between the bread and a basket of apples. What more could we have wanted than everything on Cezanne’s tilted table to spill onto ours? When the apples tumbled out of the painting, they turned sour, and when the wine bottle emptied into our father’s unfathomable glass, our mother chewed her bread slowly, carefully, and was ridiculed with great acerbity. It would be many years before I could look at The Basket of Apples without revolting. 

Jennifer Badot 

Jennifer Badot is the author of A Violet, A Jennifer (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022). Her poems and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement, Studia Mystica, the Lily Poetry Review, the Poetry is Bread Anthology (forthcoming) and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Badot lives in Somerville, MA with her plant, animal, and human family.