strawberry *shit*

James Bowden

for Antonia

Being made—

Don’t you get it? It’s the parrot trembling on the orange tree outside.
It’s chef snoopy.
It’s buying salmon skins that I wouldn’t eat if you paid me to and all the times we might’ve died.
Cat parade, Lip Parade, for emma, forever ago. Going Costco chicken on some homemade curry and soup.
It’s the corner, and how we’re always living in the cold until we’re not, and to be warm is to make way
for a deeper chill and by golly, how I shiver with liveliness already. The way snow
touches the skin, and is “snow” more. Oh, Ocean, this is all but sputtering;
my crayons are smearing and there are no real words for that

Perhaps, most of all,
it is the strawberry plant
that won’t berry by the time you’ve gone

and how little difference it makes anyway, how local life can be

and as you would say:
*shit*

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There are myriad references here, to a Studio Ghibli movie called The Cat Returns, Bon Iver’s Holocene as well as For Emma, Forever Ago, Dermot Kennedy’s The Corner as well as Young and Free, and of course, Ocean Vuong’s poem “Devotion”. And Antonia.