I have to hurry, or I’ll never find her.
Mom looks past her newspaper.
You can finish your breakfast.
She’ll be around.
There’s no rush.
I sit back down, chew and swallow.
Am I free now? I reach for the old beach pail
stained huckleberry blue.
Take some coins from the pot. Don’t go far.
Huckleberries?
Where is the ghost who lives in that voice?
People say, Be careful of the Huckleberry Woman.
No one lets people like her inside.
They say she’d steal an apple off your kitchen table.
She takes off, fast as she comes
and the bulges in her pockets are wings.
Huckleberries?
She comes from high-up far
where wild people burn the tops of hills
to make more berries grow.
Her kind are richer than we know.
Coins jingle in their hankies.
And that’s not all people say.
Strangers like the Huckleberry Woman
grab empty land—that’s where they live.
Huckleberries?
She’s crossing at the light,
so quick you’d think she’s running
to sell berries to the fire hydrant.
Huckleberries?
I run so fast
my mind can find the high burned places
where her wild children
play with foxes and wolves.
They stay up all night
and follow the moon with their bright eyes.
Before we’re up they’re swimming in the wind.
They leap where new sprouts pop through the black burn.
Those kids really are rich with berries,
berries to throw, berries to turn each other blue
wrestling with their huckleberry-blue hands.
They can squish berries under their bare toes,
blue children who smell like the pail in my hand.
Huckleberry Woman! I’ve caught up and she hears.
She kneels, brings down her big tub in front of me.
Do you steal children? I whisper.
She pours blue into my pail,
berries bumble over the sides, onto the sidewalk.
She takes the coins from my hand,
under my finger hooks the handle of my pail.
Up goes her tub of huckleberries
to rest again on its high stand.
She rises, she flies.
Published by “Zig Zag Lit Mag,” Chapbook 4, 2021