Strawberry
When I was ten
someone told me
“Right now, your uterus
is the size of a small strawberry”.
I thought of red staining the tongue,
seeds scraping the bumps on its underside.
Today the memory came back all wrong
pacing along double-lines staining pink
as fruit on tissue left out too long.
Out of season, yet it is the size
of a strawberry.
I cry the way you cry
when you already know
what you have to do.
I fear this the way one is afraid of certain rooms.
It presses on that voice, that kitchen,
the calm cruelty of information
how easily they told me
what grows where.
I try with all I have not to imagine its roots.
think “this is my body” like a spell that works
if you say it a thousand times.
Somewhere, summer strawberries are being
washed, hulled, sugared, loved.
And people say
how small, how sweet,
how lucky.