Poem: Six, Seven Strawberries (not, alas, a Flarf)

Last night I was a Flarfee. I was a teenage Flarf. I dreamed I Flarfed in my Maidenform bra. Oh ye of little Flarf. Consider the Flarf. It neither toils nor spins (being all about Flarfing). So I was at an all-Flarf poetry reading: Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, Shanna Compton, Burt Reynolds, two scuba divers from the Grand Caymans, an innocent babe. Much laughing. (Flarf lays bare the human condition and tickles it.)

The poem I herein post has not a thing to do with Flarf. I talked with an NYU film student, however, Felix. We discussed Bergman. Less intelligent topics too. I promised I'd send him my Bergman poem, Smiles of a Summer Night, and doing so was reminded of my sainted ma, a Swede, who instilled in all her four daughters (although one of my sisters refused to acknowledge same) a love of the metaphysical and strawberries.

Six, Seven Strawberries

Oh to be a strawberry so smashed on a slice
of buttered bread that insides and outs are
children standing, arms wide and mouths
open in the dancing downpour. Oh to feel
sugar sprinkled. We Swedes may be dumb
like smiles glossy from a nincompoop’s
joke but try this and tell me life’s bleak:
strawberries, repeat, berries plump as
thumbs, handfuls in your father’s white
handkerchief sagging like a cot at summer
camp with five girls giggling feathers
to the air. Spread butter on white bread.
Remember both have histories, meadows
green as foliage imploding with dew and
a thousand lush dreams. Your mother
with blush pink roses flowering through
her cheeks and smoky wisps of hair
sweaty on her pulsing temples. You once
fit two more happy girls on the cot so now
more strawberries, six, seven strawberries
on the butter, strawberries rubbing
strawberries, fleshy ladies joyous despite
bellies bulges, striations life makes.

______
Sarah Sarai, pub. in The Smoking Poet
& included in The Future Is Happy, available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution.