Strawberry Fight

They warn against the light — dodge the sun: what else can it do after all but love too much? We go pick strawberries in a May field anyway. In those days, the light was cleaner. Fields brimming with birds fractal over first fruits. She says she loves the happy birds. Why is it so easy to not hear them now? I ask how long, and she says the doctors say 6 months. Every time a measurement is made, the universe splits into two, a universe for each answer. In her many worlds, the myriad body, a panoply of girlhoods, each one day longer than the last. She bends to collect fallen fruit from the earth, and I pitch a strawberry at her small side. Her child body begins to echo. A strawberry fight ensues: the first fruit thrown. We pelt our backs with red dimpled stones, remnants of jeweled juice across our skin. She is her own ghost army against herself: her figure shimmering into halves and glowing outward into strawberry air as her arms hoist fruits, torso twists into more pieces, each a pathway to its corresponding angels, a small grouping of unreliable day stars. Rose lesions stripe the sky, her skin a palimpsest being rewritten until she is numerous as the papilla of our mouths stained red, then at once, a single bloom of feathers left standing stunning in the sun.