BLACKBERRIES

by Isabel Cristina Legarda


After cherries and strawberries peaked in mid-June
he appeared at the farm with his truck and those boots
that I didn’t much like. But I needed the help,
so I hired him then – a decision I knew
I might come to regret. And at first it was fine –
just a look here and there, or a casual smile;
I had total control of where that could all go.
But then blackberry season arrived, sticky heat
that made droplets of sweat trickle down and around
muscled arms, wisps of hair, and the napes of our necks.
There were deer flies and dragonflies, fireflies at night,
wood debris to burn, down in the meadows at dusk,
willing bodies to lift and lean over and lie
with, exhausted, when aprons and work shirts came off
so the breeze could waft over the salt on our skin.
It was in such a lull that an evening of talk
could become something more, and a lingering gaze
would reveal the deep longing of one lonely soul
for another. That summer was ages ago;
I was young, unattached, free to live as I pleased.
I have since learned that love’s not enough to succeed.
There’re now lines on my face and brown spots here and there,
and you’d think that the memory of such a time
would be all but forgotten, a dream, a mirage,
insufficient to quicken an old woman’s pulse.
But my grandson went grocery shopping today,
and the berries he brought me were ripe as could be,
from an orchard that made its own jam and mulled wine,
and my past came back, shockingly intimate, hard,
in a well of desire in my pelvis and chest,
in the blackberries crushed in the roof of my mouth
bleeding sweetly within, purple taste, like his kiss.


* * * * *

Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the U.S. She is currently a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Smartish Pace, FOLIO, The Dewdrop, The Lowestoft Chronicle, West Trestle Review, and others. Her chapbook Beyond the Galleons was published this year by Yellow Arrow Publishing. She can be found on Instagram: @poetintheOR.