Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 16 features Kathryn Petruccelli reading “Whales” and Paola Bruni reading “Limoncini". Whales By Kathryn Petruccelli I have a photo of my mother in a gray hoodie on a boat—a whale watching trip. We see a few tails at a distance. Regardless, for the five-hour duration, she holds her camera to her eye, with the exception of this moment, when I take her picture. In another version, the boat rocks wildly in the wake of all the breaching; squeals from excited tourists create a din. I have to shout to my mother. She turns toward me, my photo a brief interruption to her agenda: she clicks and clicks at the splashing. Let’s say this time the water is glass. Far off on the horizon, what might be a small spray from a blowhole, maybe a second. A pod moving off. My mother is nonetheless enthralled, wind buffeting us. She anchors herself, turns and smiles, and that’s when I snap the picture. What I left out before is that the boat zooms to a likely spot before the captain cuts the motor. Soon, a female humpback sidles up next to us and goes to sleep. The crew calls it “extraordinary” over the PA system. The boat lists to one side while every passenger aboard leans out over open ocean to try to get a photo. Eventually, mom and I give up our spots to let others see. We shake our heads in awe. She poses on the opposite rail, empty of people, and I shoot off a bunch of pictures. The one I like best I frame and station in the living room. After several years and two moves, I forget the details of the trip. At some point, I slide the picture out of its smart black metal and replace it with one of the kids posing in Halloween costumes. The truth is, it’s off season. There are no other tourists on the deck. The few who came are inside eating Doritos; the wind is cold and mom and I alone brave it. Even though right out of the docks we had dolphins following the boat’s wake, now all is quiet minus an occasional cormorant overhead. It isn’t until we’re almost back at the harbor, the crew apologetic, naturalist going on and on about breeding habits, that I think to aim my camera at mom, who smiles obligingly, tells me she doesn’t mind about the whales, it was still a thrill just to be on the water. There is no boat. Mom and I stand on sand and squint in the direction the German man pointed. We can only make out white crests on a choppy sea. Mom pulls her hood on and focuses her lens on hermit crabs in the tidepool. I’ve forgotten my camera in the car. Tomorrow she will fly home across the country and I will see her again once more before the day I arrive at the hospital and kiss her cheek. She’ll leave me a letter that says, It was enough. Limoncini By Paola Bruni The small craters of the sun-tipped Villafranca lemon, bitter to the tongue. Perhaps, my grandmother would say, a propagation like the Sicilians themselves— too much salt in the air. The fruit has a pale oval neck, an inconspicuous nipple. To her, it was a stunted variety, as I feared was I. My breasts, she termed limoncini, a pair of petite sour fruits I’d inherited from my father’s side. For hers were classically Primofiore, a strain of lemon excessive in their fleshy countenance. In my adolescence, she took to pinching my nipples between her thumb and forefinger. I implored my mother to intervene. But on the subject of breasts, she spoke only to say, You didn’t want my milk, my infant lips refusing to suckle. When the surgeons took my mother’s left breast, I was eighteen and filled with remorse. Does rejection grow invasive roots? Grandmother developed an attraction for the ample, thick-rind Genoa and Lisbon species. On special occasions, the Limetta was sought, a sweet incestuous marriage of the Eureka lemon and Mexican lime. She served fricassea di vitella, cotolette di maiale fritte, crostata di limone—dishes so rife with lemony hues, every meal lifted to a bright archipelago. We did not understand the lemon’s complex vocabulary, or how deeply its seeds were sown. By the time I left college, Grandmother stopped referring to my breasts as limoncini. Instead, un pecato, a shame. She worried I would not mate, would not propagate. How often I thought of her through my barren, childless years. Grandmother was long gone when Mother’s right breast was trimmed away. She was left no foliage to soak up the warmth of the world, only pale pink branches that spread across her chest.