They bulldozed the orchard last year, slapped down pavement,
planted a Texaco where the trees used to be. Some nights
you can still smell the fruit fermenting beneath the asphalt,
the air holding on like it remembers, low and swollen, hard to swallow.
Mulberries keep pushing through the cracks, keep making a meal
out of concrete, staining the soles of men who don’t look down.
A girl working the register says you can’t kill a root system like that,
says it’ll outlive all of us, says she heard of a boy once
who bled out beneath these trees, but maybe that’s just a story,
maybe it’s just something you tell yourself to explain
why nothing that dies here stays dead for long.
A man comes in for gas, for scratch-offs, until day eats each
portion of night. Says he has a feeling,
says luck is just knowing what to ask for and when.
I have never been good at asking. I have never known what to call
the things that keep pressing up through the places
where they were told not to grow.
This time, I leave the berries where they fall.
Watch them soften, become turgid, burst open—
dark mouths widening in the heat,
answering with their small hearts of grief.
Ali C is a poet and author of the chapbook, NIGHT OF THE FIRE (Ethel, 2025). Poems have been published in Sontag Mag, diode, and others. Learn more at www.alixyz.club.