These vines have lived 
in my memory for 30 years, 
existing on ridges that flicker, 
disappearing from my GPS 
system as I arrive. 
The bushes have multiplied 
since my last visit, becoming 
more like a forest of willowy 
trees overseen by the same 
partially-deaf farmer, his eyes 
clouded from consulting the sky. 
He exists in a dim shanty 
like a Buddhist monk 
who’s devoted his whole life 
to growing blueberries, his awareness 
of his orchard a bodily memory 
as he directs me to the sweetest vines, 
“Turn right at the bee balm, right 
at the coneflowers. Follow the path 
to the ridge. Pick from rows 23 or 26.” 

There are thousands of rows, ridge 
upon ridge. I wade into cascades 
of berries, growing asymmetrically, 
ripening unevenly, each cluster a fiesta 
of green, red, dusty rose, indigo, iced cyan. 
A branch breaks across my forehead, 
baptizing my eyes back to the time 
they were blue and susceptible 
to dazzlement, and I knew the taste 
of everything—windowpanes, doorknobs, 
crayons—because I tasted everything 
within reach with impunity. 

Surely this kind of innocence no longer exists. 
Even here, there’s a sin jar 
near the exit where I must pay 
for berries I’ve eaten off the vine 
before weighing, but my stomach 
is weightless, as if I’ve harvested 
light all afternoon. I pause, 
unable to determine how much I owe 
for this moment’s unearned pleasures. 
I know only that if grace were a color, 
it’d be periwinkle or coneflower 
blue. If charity were a sound 
it’d be blueberries plopping 
into an empty bucket. If truth 
could be seen it would be a strand 
of clouds rising like woodsmoke 
through a cerulean sky. 

Blueberries (watercolor, 2025) copyrighted © by Susan Tekulve

Susan Tekulve’s

newest book is Bodies of Light (Serving House Books, 2024), her first full-length collection of poetry, which was included on the CLMP’s International Women’s History Month 2025 booklist (28 February 2025). She is also the author of Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press); and In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. And she has two short-story collections published: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press), the latter of which received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appears in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series.

Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in journals such as The Comstock Review, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, Italian Americana, The Louisville Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Letters, Puerto del Sol, and Shenandoah. Ms. Tekulve has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.

Author’s website: https://susantekulve.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Hummingbird, a poem by Susan Tekulve in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, 1 January 2023); nominated by MacQ in September 2023 for Best of the Net 2024

⚡ Six Artworks by Ms. Tekulve in MacQ (Issue 15, September 2022)

⚡ Socks, a poem by Ms. Tekulve in MacQ (Issue 14, August 2022); nominated in early 2023 for The Pushcart Prize XLVIII by Pushcart’s board of contributing editors

⚡ White Blossoms, a photo essay by Ms. Tekulve in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Fall 2019), selections from which were printed in Earth Hymn (Volume 6 of the KYSO Flash Anthology, 2019)