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Blackberries

James Rioux

It may in the end come to this: memory
the tongue will not abandon to fact,
the dark fruit bobbing in sugared cream . . .
We made our shirts into baskets, dawn
hung dew-luminous on branches,
cricket-thick glade abuzz with rising heat,
our young hands among thorns. It’s enough,
perhaps, to have lived this, to have known
the summer air stung ripe, to hold
up against all that is leaving us
these berry-stained t-shirts, fingers
purpled sticky-sweet, the warm cream
dribbling our chins, and this mouth
still bruised with what it can’t say.