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.