Summer Fruit

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Summer Fruit

I plucked wild raspberries
from a prickly vine on a path in Maine.
Seven, or maybe thirteen, little bubbles of red on each berry
warm from the sun, fragile
held together by little more than good will
almost perceptibly breathing out oxygen
(O₂)
ooohhhhh...toooo...
I could hold twenty in my palm.
A tight hot rage gathers in my chest and throat.
Desire to smash them with my fist.
Why should they get to be so precious?
I deserve to ruin something beautiful
innocent and perfect. Doesn’t everyone else?
Berries tumble onto paper, with
dark satisfaction, ground to a pulp, exposed
to the burning sun
for the paper to remember forever
this hurt, sharing pain with an innocent fruit.
A small valve of relief once I’ve begun, and
watermelon juice explodes through my fingers
from the grip I have on its flesh.
Limes are not so easy to subdue,
they spill their juice with acid bite as they do.
I understand, finally, the critique from before,
“Your work is too beautiful.”
I refused to look at pain,
stubborn in my allegiance to hope.
Optimism, an opiate.
Still, pain follows me
like a hungry dog
and I feel it’s time to throw it a bone.
Summer fruit will have to do.