In Eugene, I slept on the couch of an Herbalist.
If, in slumber, I leaned too far to my left,
the cushions would slump, sink, at a diagonal,
pulling my unconscious body down with them.
At 3 in the morning I’d awake to the sound of crickets outside the double doors
a nuzzle of black fur, a cat named Mortimer, pawing,
climbing his way towards me, then settling on my chest, his breathing
slowing to the rhythm of the dehydrator
that shriveled the marion-berries at our feet. Together,
pulled by a berry lullaby,
drifting back to the dreams we half-remembered,
awake when the crickets came again.
In Eugene I harvested blackberry leaves and mother’s wort
beside the Herbalist, learned to ease headaches and cramps,
nausea and allergies with bottles of sweet-smelling, earth.
We cleared patches of grass until our thumbs blistered and the sunflowers
awoke with smiles on their cheeks, risen from a warm-bedding earth.
We picked blackberries form the branches as we worked,
our browned gloves barely free of our hands
by the time the solid sweet crushed to liquid,
and bid hello to our parched tongues.
In Eugene I ran from the Amazon Park to the Willamette River,
light footsteps thumping past TJ’s Provisions “the best cannabis in town,”
a bleacher of dread-locked fans cheered me on from the sidewalk
in dazed stardom, “girl, you training for a marathon?”
They rose, hazy, while I fell, more alive. In Eugene.
In Eugene the Herbalist sang for me,
strummed her guitar to questions I never thought
I always wondered. The rhythms asked me what one says
before they say I love you. I told them I don’t know. I
told them ask the blackberries.
The Herbalist and I shared stories,
a plate of tempeh bacon, a bottle of red wine.
In Eugene I paid for a 10-dollar chair massage
from an old woman in a long, gray braid and a crinkled, orange tunic
at the Saturday Farmers Market. I reminded her
of Venita, the teenage cousin who listened to Stevie Nicks,
smoked cigarettes out the car window. She
wanted to be just like Venita when she grew up, thanked
me for reminding her to call Venita, sometime soon.
Another time. Another day.
There would be other days for weeding and planting,
for singing, for dancing and doing.
There would always be other days
In a town like Eugene.
In Eugene I slept on the couch of an Herbalist.
She gave me an album of love songs, tinctures of herbs
to kiss my sore throat,
two cloud-cushions to cup my tired, my lonely, my nomad limbs,
and handfuls of Concord grapes.
I felt lonely then loved then lonely again,
Then wondered if I might just move to a little house
with an herb garden,
grow blackberries around the porch,
adopt a cat and name him after an old, British man
once I reach California.
*Cover image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/734438651705888805/
That morning, a young girl helped her mother sell the family’s traditional Dominican sweets, smiling with pride, waving her hands over the layers of Nutella, the powdered cookies, the tres leches, and the bizcocho dominicano. “Should I be in it?!” she eagerly inquired when I asked to take a picture of the duo’s market stand, her smile already locked in a parallel with my iPhone’s camera lens, her body already fixed into the frame. A farmer from Mexico cooked chili peppers in a cylindrical grill, the green vegetable flesh sizzling and crackling under a bright flame, challenging the 90 degree day. Vendors spoke in Russian mixed with Spanish mixed with Thai. The vast majority of their customers spoke English. Those customers were mostly white.
