Eggs were our livelihood. Two or three thousand

leghorns, layers, loose in skinny backhouses

long like my mother’s body, like mine was becoming.

Behind them, a patch of wild blackberries,

pendants plump and glossy as the black-bodied

flies swarming warm piles of chicken litter.

My mother scrubbed every egg with detergent,

standing for hours on cracked linoleum,

her face a perfect oval. Though she’d scorned

plain serviceable women who preferred

unembossed china to her Wedgwood Patrician

because egg got stuck in its ridges,

even she would become serviceable, though never plain.

Once every summer she reveled in daylong jellying,

cheesecloth stretched tight over the kettle –

balm and blackness. We picked in long britches

to ward off the chiggers, chiggers,

a word so like the word we were not to utter.

The farther we went in the less we minded

the heat, the less we counted, as if July never

stopped ripening in our buckets. We watched

the tender blackness swell to royal purple, jewelling

in clear hot jars on the kitchen table.

Would we ever want to be anywhere but here

in the dusk with our mother,

telling her our hearts were hers, though never in words.