Author’s Note: Anyone who knows me is familiar with the blackberry tattoo on my ribcage. I think they’re a beautiful fruit, but something I’ve found so fascinating about them is the many forms they take, with the flowers, the thorns, and the fruits themselves. This is a piece exploring the poetry of the blackberry plant.
My mother used to tell me to never buy blackberries from the supermarket because they grow everywhere, so it’s a waste to buy them. I think about that every time that I buy blackberries. They don’t grow anywhere near in Oxford, so the only place I can taste them is in the plastic punnets they sell in the Tesco express, amid aisles of fruits and vegetables and the loneliness of a Tuesday afternoon. I will buy blackberries even when they’re not in season, because I want them to be loved even if they’re not perfect: I crave the sour taste on my tongue, the reminder that every September I will return.
I was a flower. I remember it clearly. I bloomed in white, five distinct petals. They used to praise me for it. You have such beautiful petals, darling. Never cut them off. When my flowers disappeared, it wasn’t by my own accord. Didn’t we all grow up? Didn’t we all deserve to bloom in different ways?
I grew up among flowers, and I always thought they were beautiful. I avoided bees because they scared me, and was instead fascinated by the petals of the girls around me. I was a beautiful Mary Magdalen in my Year 4 production, and my robe was burgundy, like the fruits before they were quite ripe. I wore the purity of the white like a May Day crown, but when the perfect Summer of my childhood was over, I woke up with blood on my forehead and brambles around my neck.
When my fruit blossomed, I was crushed into the pulp and displayed in a jam jar, sweetened, and warmed up. I was less cloying, no longer the sweet white flower of my youth, but something tasteful, alluring. I was glad for the hands on me, for the people reaching past the thorns of my exterior I grew to protect my petals. I was a flower. I remember that.
I am a thorn, I am a flower, I am the taste of blackberry jam. I will come around every September and I will appear again and then I won’t leave. There is far too much of me and you miss me when I’m not here and wish for me to be gone otherwise.
I will rot and I will bloom and I remain intoxicating but I can’t remain this way all the time: I am shifting and I am changing and I don’t know who I am anymore.
And when my berries began to rot again, I will beg them to come back, to tear at me with your fingers. I will stain you with red, leaving behind a cloying taste on your tongue, stuck between your teeth like a cigarette, a habit you can’t quit. A smudge on your lips and a stain on your neck, I reach for you with shaking hands like the grasping brambles.
I am a flower. I was a flower. I am everything at once, and it keeps repeating, the blackberries and the brambles and the Septembers and people coming and going and yet, and yet, and yet. I am a flower.