It’s Bananas

SARAH K. LENZ

April 20, 2020

I heard on a radio report

that since the pandemic 

has closed down schools, whole-

sale fruit sellers don’t know

what to do with thousands

of single bananas—the supermarkets

only want bunches and bunches.

When I was a kid, I tried

purposefully, to slip on

peels. Was it really as easy

as I’d seen on TV? It wasn’t.

When Sandy was in intensive care

dying, as her kidney function ground

down, I remember after we left,

I saw in the parking lot a banana peel,

frozen solid, black, and curled in on itself.

Then there was this afternoon, twelve

rollie-pollies, munching greedily, in what

must have been bug ecstasy—on a

sun-yellow slip of banana peel, in the

center of my green lawn.

SARAH K. LENZ’S writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, The Fourth River, Entropy, and elsewhere. Three of her essays have been named Notable in Best American Essays, and she received the New Letters Readers’ award in nonfiction. She teaches composition and literature at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas.