When the light frost settles
we go out picking.
Down the morning veil
of the hill we go
down to rows of shrubs,
red-bulbed, neon
in the slow autumn crawl.
We pluck peduncles of each hip,
and fill our baskets. They,
like angels with sepal wings,
lie limp. But still something
is alive in their death,
inside their opaque skins,
seeds, uncrushed by our hands.
She tells me of 1946
when she was ten,
mimics with her hands
what happened in the barn,
how she survived:
one hand high
milking the teat of a cow,
the other low,
sweeping the gun under the hay.
I was lucky, she says,
to be raised a boy, so
it didn’t matter what they did,
it doesn’t matter now.
We go out picking when
she tells me stories like these
as her fingers squeeze
each hip, and their seeds
beat behind her stone skin.