Gathering What is Left On the Black Raspberry Canes by T. C. Mill

Gathering What is Left on the Black Raspberry Canes

I reach into the bramble, accepting each bite,

a sting as strong as sweetness on my fingers.

Yes, I know what it will do—this berry patch

in the woodlot, belonging to no one, and

the world of which it is the last, Mistress

of everything, or at least of all that remains:

Mommy Dom Nature Herself.

I don’t believe She’s lashing out, though She

has reason to. I know all about cruelty as

an act of love, when pain felt so right

that you’d want to feel nothing else, ever

again—my privilege and my pleasure

to offer, as I’m offered

berries in this field where I’ve learned

to feed myself, where at night

coyotes howl brokenheartedly,

and where, in half a year, the winter

will begin without snow—

no way for anyone’s steps

to leave a trace. Elsewhere,

shores turn to water

and forests to ash

as you became ash.

The only way that what

I love has ever hurt me:

“Change,” I said

at your memorial,

the softest term for leaving.

T. C. Mill is a writer and freelance editor in the United States (one answer to the question, "What do you do with a philosophy degree?") whose poems have been published in the online feminist journal Cliterature and in Strange Horizons, and who was on the longlist of the 2022 Penrose Prize for Excellence in Poetry from LGBTQIA+ Writers.