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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3889 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Picking Strawberries Steve Williams Dig in my thumbnail, pinch and twist, toss a handful into the crate. Swish the plant like hair, search for ripe earrings, wrench my back spiral, ignore my stinging thumb, shove the crate ahead. Dressed in blues and browns, straw hats over scarves, migrants rattle in Spanish. Children work next to grandma, the youngest picks twice my speed. From sitting, I shift up on one knee, then straddle the row, bend over— a cycle of appeasing pain. McCartney’s “Let it Be” pipes out of multiple transistors. Anglo kids eat too many, throw too many. Mud grows with the day on my bony purpose. I calculate how much I’ve made towards a new bike, how much that migrant family makes in a day, forget to wonder if those kids get to keep anything they earn. That night at the migrant shacks, grandma and the oldest watch the kids play between the outhouses. Mama and papa are in town taking English class. Grandma smokes a pipe and muses; soon they will have enough to send for her other son. The children laugh in the dark. |
