Sand Plums
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Sand Plums
We were Sunday trespassers, knowing foragers(blackberries, mulberries, walnuts) on familyall day fishing trips for catfish and perch, scavengersof bounty and chance, of make-do and do-without.Don’t walk around with your eyes closed.Someone’s going to take it, might as well be me.
Charles stopped the car and Anna straddled the ditch,reached over the barbed wire, reached up into limbsweighted earthward with sun-coddled fruit:sand plums, sandhill plums, Chickasaw plums,wild plums for jelly, for suck of juice, for sweetnesssluiced over the tips of dark fingers.
The wire tore the meat of her thigh, a rillof red running down Anna’s yellow leg. The hemof her dress filled with sun-colored globes, dustyand skin warm, soft embers to sear the tongue,sweet fire, sweet burn. We ate some, and some Annaturned into a nectarous shining to fill scalded mason jarssealed with wax and stored in the cool dark.
Sun and sand plums, sweetness and blood warmth,how to separate them? A barbed wire’s spur stabs a woman’sthigh, punishing the body’s ambition, its fearless wanting,wanting more. You can’t separate salt from sand, Anna said.Feral plum-meat, blood-juice. We took the fruit. We left nothing. [End Page 204]
Janice N. Harrington, born in Vernon, Alabama, is author of two books of poems, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (winner of the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Discovery Award) and The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home. She also publishes books for children. Harrington’s poems have appeared widely in periodicals and anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry and the forthcoming Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford UP, 2nd edition). She teaches creative writing in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
