The raspberries, blueberries, and peach pits
for dinner plates. Wash your hands with seat cushions. 

I don't want to make jam this year.
I don't want a card board crate 
with congregations of blue berries.
One July when I was eight I imagined I was 
on an island of blue berry fields--
that I was picking for my family
in cool cave just over
the shrugging shoulder of our vertebrae of
the Appalachians. 
I don't want bushel baskets of free stone peaches
huddled together like choir girls.
When I was too old to imagine myself 
on an island but not too old
to appreciate the mystic nature
of orchards and summer noons
My mother, my brother, my father, and I
concluded each peach on the ridge looked 
too much like amethyst not to pick--
we greedy-gathered villages, parishes, and
sewing circles and looked
at them all on the kitchen table--
a fuzzy, chalky, fruit skined-tablecloth for dinner.
I still didn't want to make jam or apple butter
or scones. I didn't want to peel them--
never liked the sight of boiled blue berry mush--
the skin unfurled like lavender petals
or amathyst veins--
And then I remember the time when I was
thirteen that my mother and I took
murder on our hands and picked 
raspberries from the farm down
the back road where you couldn't see
Arby's or Burger King or the Mini Golf Course
so we could both pretend there wasn't a 
highway for us to drive home on.
And we didn't take any raspberries
with us-- we sat on either side
of a bush and ate with bloody hands--
the hands of raccoons or pioneers or
beat poets trying to write something
meaningful about death-- made a dinner
setting from the tilled earth mounds.
And there was no raspberry jam.
And there was no raspberry scones.
And there was no teal pints to take home.
There was blood on our hands--
But for that late sunset we escaped
to nothing but berries, and fingers
and blood like amethyst.
We wiped our hands on the 
seat cushions of the station 
wagon on the way home-- kept
our crime in the raspberry
scabs under our cuticles.