Blackberries 2
- Blackberries 2
Be reasonable: no spirit, bone, ghost business.This is jam making. That's a cloud of steam off the pot.
Your mother's teeth are blacked outbecause she's been eating blackberries.
This is your last chance. This is the final summer picking.Listen to her now, what she's trying to teach you.
Drop some of what you've cooked down on a cool plate.Hope it sets up. It's a solid thing we're after here. [End Page 339]
Rose Mclarney's poetry collections are Its Day Being Gone and The Always Broken Plates of Mountains. A new book, Forage, is due out this September from Penguin Poets. An associate professor of creative writing at Auburn University, she is also coeditor and poetry editor of Southern Humanities Review and coeditor of A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, forthcoming this fall from University of Georgia Press.
