【Written by Caroline Richards】

My hands are wrapped in hair 
of railroad vine and golden shower,
but the soil of you is all over and in-between 
the garden troughs.

I pull raspberries from their cupped resting place
and remember the cruel pomegranate.
Stem-throat and meniscus-tongue that whispered
bullet wood, monkey pistol, strangler fig. 

Then lips like sand grains in my bed, phantom-hands 
I found stealing petals from my flowers—
rootless, ruthless thing 
I called you. Crowned and dead-headed.

I could have loved you if not for this unbidden 
darkness, this shadow-life of above. 
Even Time, our bitter anesthetic, could not stop 
the way I died as you grew.

Now the raspberry runs down my wrist
as though it is fleeing my grasp, its redness 
I can only see as fleeting. On my fingers 
I’ll count the days.