Picking Berries, Belvedere, 1975
by Michelle Bitting
Praise to the summers spent whacking paths through blackberry bushes and
to our mothers who knew just how much sugar and pectin to swivel in, just
how long to let the violet pots bubble and swirl while they tossed back
Tanqueray & limes under an evergreen canopy, Mom and bestie Susie from
Seattle tucked into the Spruce-dotted deck, late sun slipping away like a
child with stolen pantry cake through backdoor screens, light sucking its
stomach in, making a skinny ribbon, an echo without a blink. Our
mothers sipping their tart, icy drinks while we foraged, gossip and
You’ll never believe what happened next gasped into the last rays casting
shade over redwood slats and stripes across their swim-suited chests, rendering
them zoo creatures or inmates—cages or heaven—it’s hard to say, caught as
they were in that epoch’s cross hairs, shades of June Cleaver fading under
Steinem’s bold new strokes, frosty points of their pink toes tapping code
against the deck’s dark grain, their stifled bursts—laughter or low moans—
over a husband’s secret deals, affairs, clients gone awry, the leaked lives,
domestic baggage unleashed like exotic lap animals between them as cold
gin greased vocal strings and volumes rose: signal to us on our return of
their liquored, compromised state and therefore freedom to do as we
pleased after we’d dumped our brimming pails—bounty left to ruddy
immaculate kitchen sinks—sprinting then through shushing sprinklers to
rinse dirt and brambles off, cooling ourselves in the high August heat. Our
quest completed, one summer, my ersatz cousin Karen came running to
where our mothers still reclined, savoring twilight cocktails while dinner’s
chicken pot pies bronzed on indoor racks, a scarlet band worming its way
down Karen’s leg as she ran, staining daisy bikini bottoms. I’m bleeding! And
we thought maybe a rabid bush—berry prick—the tooth of a straggler vine
catching her thigh’s soft underside in our rush to straddle thorns and snag
the inky clumps, little brain-shaped bursts we’d fill our mouths and baskets
with, ravenous for the dark marbles, their juicy explosions, like the city’s far-
off glimmer, its roiling, magical bay. We’d leapt like ponies back to where
our mothers cackled on, and now here was Karen doing a little plié,
displaying the red rivulets, eyes lowered, overwhelmed. I thought she and I
might be sick for a second, excitement and dread for my cousin’s first period
(how I wished it was me!) while our inmate mothers leaned in to Ooohh and
Aaahhh and grin big at Karen, stroking her rookie cheeks, slurping the dregs
of perspiring highballs as furies of forest leaves rustled, circling us in the
dusk breeze and we moved inside to help Karen clean up, past the black
simmering pots, dipping our pinkies in that stygian, sugary goo—best you
ever tasted—sticky and sweet like the news of a daughter’s menses we’d jar
and seal under layers of thick wax long before the fathers came home.
Michelle Bitting’s fourth collection, Broken Kingdom won the Catamaran Prize and was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best of 2018. Poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Love's Executive Order, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. A finalist in the 2019 Sonora Review and New Millennium Flash Prose contests, she won the 2018 Fischer Prize and Robert J. DeMott Awards. Michelle is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at Ashford U.