Digital Paper: What You Missed

What You Missed

You weren’t there
so you didn’t see that strawberry—
resting with her sisters on the square of newsprint
all tumbled together in saucy exuberance
red to make pomegranate envious
confident cousins
of their modern pale, woody relations—
    confined to green plastic baskets
    imprints on their gridded flesh
    left to sag, fuzzy and disheartened
    an embarrassment to berries everywhere.

No, this one knew herself:
diminutive scarlet goddess
plucked from the garden of a backwoods witch
just as her juices ran reddest,
just as she always meant to be.

You did not take that bite.
You did not lick the berry blood from your fingers,
then close your eyes to listen
to the dust float down on the sunshine,
the susurration of the pines
whispering poems of spiders and sap.

I come back to fruit domesticated by white ceramic
and silver serrated knife,
and can only think of her—
the last wild strawberry on that square of newsprint
smudged with a smear of soft cheese
amongst Gretel’s breadcrumbs so carelessly strewn:

sacrament to my senses:
how she surrendered herself!
bursting with sweet agony
as I crushed her against my tongue—
leaving only a ruby stain
and crumpled green stars
still fragrant with forest.

©L. Michelle Quraishi, 2008

Michelle Quraishi, BAWP 2001, taught for many years. Currently, she runs around after her almost-two-year-old and tries to understand his spoken word. She breaks dawn every morning by writing three pages in her journal and three hundred words of her novel-in-progress, The House of Doors. She can be reached at jahatama@yahoo.com.

Lovely to see your poetry up here! Enjoy the strawberries and your baby.
--Keri DuLaney Greger ( kdulaneygreger@dvc.edu ) from on 9/4/2008; 1:03:55 PM

Beautiful! Reminds me of the sweet wild blueberries I picked this summer and how they paled in comparison to their fleshy, overgrown cultivated cousins.
--Page ( page@pagehersey.com ) from Fairfax, CA on 8/11/2008; 7:16:51 PM

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