It was a risk my father had taken in midwinter:
ordering 240 pint boxes of blueberries
in less than desirable condition at a discount
so they could be repicked, repacked, and resold.
We stand together before crates of blueberries --
the color of river pebbles in water, some flecked with mold.
I am twenty-nine years old, and yet my father instructs
me as though I were a child again, hiding
between the aisles of lettuces and squash in the store.
“Daughter, look,” he says. He squeezes a blueberry
between his thumb and finger until the skin tears.
I see now: rotten ones bruise to the touch.
We pick in silence. By the second hour,
our fingers stiffen, their nail beds
purple from juice.
Suddenly, my father’s voice emerges as though from a distance:
“You were not meant to live this kind of life.”
But nor was he — a man with a mind made wide by books,
who as a child rose with the sun to read by its light.
We’re left with fewer boxes than we had thought.
How, how to price them? $3.99 per pint.
ordering 240 pint boxes of blueberries
in less than desirable condition at a discount
so they could be repicked, repacked, and resold.
We stand together before crates of blueberries --
the color of river pebbles in water, some flecked with mold.
I am twenty-nine years old, and yet my father instructs
me as though I were a child again, hiding
between the aisles of lettuces and squash in the store.
“Daughter, look,” he says. He squeezes a blueberry
between his thumb and finger until the skin tears.
I see now: rotten ones bruise to the touch.
We pick in silence. By the second hour,
our fingers stiffen, their nail beds
purple from juice.
Suddenly, my father’s voice emerges as though from a distance:
“You were not meant to live this kind of life.”
But nor was he — a man with a mind made wide by books,
who as a child rose with the sun to read by its light.
We’re left with fewer boxes than we had thought.
How, how to price them? $3.99 per pint.
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The Corrected Version, Diode Editions, 2023. Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.
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Courtesy of Pete Coco, photographer
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Rosanna Young Oh is a Korean American poet and essayist who was born in Daejeon, Korea, and grew up on Long Island. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Best New Poets, Harvard Review Online, Blackbird, The Hopkins Review, and 32 Poems. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence. A graduate of Yale, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she lives and writes in New York. The Corrected Version is her first book.
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