This is the first time we’ve been together in the garden—mom, dad, and I—since that one time in high school.It is mid June, I am heartbroken, and we are bentdown in the grass, picking the summer strawberries.I’d forgotten this is effort. White noon brewing,fingers moving dirt, grass prints pressed to palm.This year the strawberries have bloomed in abundance,my mother says, and my heart is full of strawberriesmy lover has taken a bite of, pierced, sweet, and open.This year, my mother says, we’ve had so many strawberries,filling me a tupperware to go. How many times, I begin to think,how many times will I still be here with themsifting slow heat in the grass, not knowing whichwill be the time I didn’t realize was the last.I try not to go there. Dirt on my hands I try to remember,feel what it is like to touch them.
Summer Strawberries
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Copyright © 2024 by Cat Wei.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Cat Wei is a poet and writer in New York. Her work is Best of the Net nominated and appears in The Slowdown, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast among others. A Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award recipient and a Tin House Summer Workshop alumn, she has received support from the Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence Program, Vermont Studio Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Sundress Academy for the Arts.
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