Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Oak Apples

Glossy leather skin
shriveling to a dry planetoid
smaller than an egg, falling back
on its armature, cracks betraying
craters, pinholes, the debut
of forty-one departing gall wasps:
the oak swelled this squat gray sphere
to wall off seepage,
wanting a prison, making a nursery.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya, retired clinical psychologist, former German Lit major and sometimes photographer, can rarely resist the subordinate clause.