(do not) fix your gaze upon my seated harvest

by sasha levin

every spring i tend to the juneberry trees
visiting and rolling into the dirt beneath
wheels turned in & brakes locked
even when summer heat comes to barricade me
in my home, i know that i loved them
and they love me, even if i can’t taste them
beneath my mask so they know the fruit sustains me
cane and my body leaned up against the tree

but now that my health is worse than it was
some summers i roll out under the trees
dresses flowing out from my wheelchair
and you all look at me, ugly and cruel,
staring at my mask and my body as if it
could not fit into the public
as if i should not
be here
you all don’t want me here, in the parks
& the forests & the places you go to feel serene
a young person in a walker should stay home,
you think,
and anyone with me is a caregiver not a friend

every year the juneberries are sweetest
on the trees growing in the lowes parking lot
bursting with bright flavor heralding the taste
of the sweet, seedy rosehip of fall,
and even when i can barely move my limbs
i need to taste them, juicy and sun-warm,
even farm blueberries aren’t the same
and when i go late at night the parking lot is empty
and it’s just the berries and me, my beloveds and me
and there isn’t anybody to wish my body wheeled home

in the fall, the rose petals fall to the ground
& the hips grow, sweet and fragrant, pomegranate-red
i bring them to my lips unwashed, tasting, testing,
if i’m lucky enough of them survive the trip home
to become tea & jam & tasty treats, & i leave some
on thorny bushes for the deer & the birds & the squirrels
the hackberries grow in fall too, on the trees, invasive
but delicious, i see the squirrels climbing to get the berries
i could never reach, in chocolatey-avocadoey-appley glory
you have to taste them to know, soft insides crunchy nuttiness
in the shell inside the berry, like if you could bite into
the smooth brown center of an avocado, if it was
a chocolate m&m with a bit of banana flavor inside

but the hackberries stay on bare branches through winter
& i push my walker wheels underneath them, & sometimes
my friends carry me & my cane across the snow so i can
still get a tasty treat when the ground won’t let me
even as the berries on the trees dwindle to tens, or less,
and the melting ice calls out that spring is coming again
and i come again to tend the trees and the vines
& hope for summer harvest to illuminate my 3M aura
& to cover my wheels in full ziplocs & sticky juice
& hope that the people will leave me alone, or join me

sasha levin (they/them/theirs) is a white, trans, bi/aro/ace jewish nonbinary multiply disabled covid cautious poet living with long covid. they enjoy gardening and foraging, scrapbooking, making art, and hanging out with their cats.

instagram: septembermbells