Indian Strawberries

The common supermarket strawberry
is a monstrous fruit, engorged and studded
with seeds, heavy enough to really pack a punch
if you’d turn it projectile. Its meat is sweet as
anything, as sweet as romance-novel love,

as sweet as syrup chugged straight
from the bottle. But you get used to it,
this gory, so-called berry, and you get so used
to its perfectly sweet flesh that when you
stumble upon its wild cousin, you

hardly know what to do with its prim
yellow flowers and its miniature spiky fruit
hiding under the tall grasses that are too decorative
to cut. The Indian strawberry doesn’t taste
like anything at all, much less what

you’d expect from such a neat package
of such a rich red. And I guess what I’ve learned
from nibbling them on the solitary walk back home
is not a lesson in love or disappointment or
the vapid fancy of candles and roses

but what monsters our favorites can be.