Fear tastes like nothing but fills my stomach
with knots as I scroll through morning news.
We’ve lived through the hottest October recorded
in Central Texas. The only thing for it is toast:
salted butter, homemade jam.
The last remnants of backyard figs.
◊ ◊ ◊
On the sacred island of Delos, birthplace of gods,
a treeless speck, all dirt and rock and ruins,
I smelled invisible figs. Ancient fruit,
a survivor of empires, tyranny, drought. Unsheltered
from sun, breathless from heat, we stumbled
on sudden greenery, figs grown deep in cracked earth.
◊ ◊ ◊
I’ve picked fruit in the yards of rented houses too.
Gooseberries, blackberries, rhubarb, and pear.
An 1890s farmhouse once occupied, our neighbor said,
by squatters. Some fruits thrive on neglect, in exterminated
landscapes. But Illinois never felt like home: endless
cornfield, degraded prairie, where blackberries grew thick
by the porch. An unlikely place to start a family.
Between labor pains, I picked fruit to throw in the freezer.
My daughter who won’t eat figs still devours berries.
◊ ◊ ◊
I rushed through childhood, skin snagged on briars.
Wild blackberries along the American River. Stained
fingers. Tangled weeds. Nothing like the perfect rows of fruit
we passed driving south on I-5. These bushes crowd and spread,
invasive in California. We played capture-the-flag in a field
surrounded by thorns, before fires filled the valley with smoke.
Sticky summers — berries flying through air, bursting
bits of red — rinsed with the front yard hose.
We played through the end of normal weather.
◊ ◊ ◊
In drought, I let my garden go. My fig lost all its leaves.
Some plants bloom, others die. I can only watch
as fruit adapts, no longer native, no longer home.
Elizabeth Erbeznik is an educator with a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Best Small Fictions 2020, Anacapa Review, Catamaran Literary, Los Angeles Review, Terrain.org, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Northern California, she lives with her family in Austin, TX.
