Kimberly Ann Priest

Ecofeminism

Is it an age thing? Or a money thing? You see,

I’ve forgotten the romance of berries.

The round, full fruit of desire

en route to my mouth in the pickers’ rows

at a local fruit farm where we pay our forty dollars

to the woman at the window who hands us

two empty green cartons and tells us

we can hitch a golf cart ride to the rows,

pointing. Mothers take children berry picking

often. I did. Once, a cash poor mother,

I was happy to go picking because it was

so cheap. We’d have berries for days for jam

or to freeze. I look at you surprised these cartons

are twenty dollars each and decide I will eat

my weight in berries, a handful for the carton,

a handful for my body. We wander our row,

pulling from bushes as I pivot to face you

and fill my mouth with blueberries,

and you do it too—the reason they’ve charged us

forty dollars. Women are the best, you like

to tell me, and I’m grateful for the romance,

mere romance though it be, compelling us

to linger much longer in our row stockpiling

mouths in season as though the world

might totter on its axel, hysterical with cold.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press), Floralia (Unsolicited Press), and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, and Birmingham Poetry Review. She lives, with her husband, in Maine.

toc