The Homeowners Association Won’t Let Us Grow Blackberries in the Backyard

but I remember the summer when my voice
buried the boy I had been and I spent suns

in three acres of thorns at my grandmother’s
home, where the blackberries visited each July

just like her cancer. I held my weathered
and woven basket, the splintered fangs

invading my palms. My grandmother never
allowed me to pick the berries myself—

If the berries be red or purple, you just leave
them be. They ain’t ripe yet. and I knew

she meant that I was done hanging with the older
boys who lived around the corner, their car

loud and alive, a thicket of smoke rising
from the doors. Grandma knew the blade

of me, knew if I could not tongue the seeds
from my teeth, I would find something

sharper. Once, one of those boys disrespected
her, and she let the pies burn in the oven

while she went outside to mark him, her palms
still stained with the morning’s pickings.

That September, the cancer dragged grandma
to new hauntings. White men showed up

to her home in bulldozers and their engine
smoke swallowed the years. When they

poured the concrete over the fields, I knew
it was a tomb for the man I might have been,

for the fable that what we own belongs to us,
and even the splinters I held, were not mine to keep.