Charlotte Mills

Those strawberries we ate

  they were red as your lips,

                                                                                                           or perhaps they weren’t,

                                                             

  perhaps I never looked at your lips.

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We ate them the last summer before everything

on the porch of your grandparents’ house.

(I pretended they were my grandparents, sometimes,

because she was calming and baked

and he taught us to gut a fish and make mac and cheese

and I guess because they lived near us.)

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And those strawberries,

the juice ran down our hands

and that was the last summer before the red ran down my legs every month in the same way.

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We didn’t eat them daintily with forks and plastic bowls and sprinkled sugar,

we ate them by the handful                                                       warmed by the sun.

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We ate them, greedily, swallowing mouthful after mouthful,

swinging on swings for the last time,

and cussing for the first.

 

 

You, you told me to experience everything that year,

the year before I had to learn how to be without you.

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We said we would go out with a bang,

we (pretended to) choose to split apart.

I think we fizzled more, slowly and then quickly.

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We said goodbye the last summer before everything, as we washed red off of our hands.

(I don’t know how we’re happy apart.)