The Homeowners Association Won’t Let Us Grow Blackberries in the Backyard

Lyrics

but I remember the summer when my voice buried the boy I had been and I spent suns in three acres of thorns at my grandmother's home, where the blackberries visited each July just like her cancer. I held my weathered and woven basket, the splintered fangs invading my palms. My grandmother never allowed me to pick the berries myself— If the berries be red or purple, you just leave them be. They ain't ripe yet. and I knew she meant that I was done hanging with the older boys who lived around the corner, their car loud and alive, a thicket of smoke rising from the doors. Grandma knew the blade of me, knew if I could not tongue the seeds from my teeth, I would find something sharper. Once, one of those boys disrespected her, and she let the pies burn in the oven while she went outside to mark him, her palms still stained with the morning's pickings. That September, the cancer dragged grandma to new hauntings. White men showed up to her home in bulldozers and their engine smoke swallowed the years. When they poured the concrete over the fields, I knew it was a tomb for the man I might have been, for the fable that what we own belongs to us, and even the splinters I held, were not mine to keep.