Summer Strawberries
by Cat Wei
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 bent
down 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 strawberries
my 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 them
sifting slow heat in the grass, not knowing which
will 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.
—mom, dad, and I—since that one time in high school.
It is mid June, I am heartbroken, and we are bent
down 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 strawberries
my 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 them
sifting slow heat in the grass, not knowing which
will 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.
Cat Wei is a poet and writer in New York. She is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award recipient, a Tin House Workshop alumn, and an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow. Her work is Best of the Net nominated and appears or is forthcoming in The Slowdown, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Glass Poetry, No Dear, and others. A finalist for the Disquiet Literary Contest and Pleiades' Prufer Poetry Prize, she has received support from The Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence Program, the Vermont Studio Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Winter Tangerine. A Princeton University German Department Book Award winner, she holds a BA in Comparative Literature and a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.