Strawberries

I bought my dad a case of strawberries

from a young man on the side of the road

whose skin was as dark as the earth

he worked on. I hand them to my father.

He sets the red fruit down on the table and stares.

He holds out his hands, wrinkled and calloused,

how they used to scoop up strawberries he says

how he used those hands to carry them home,

make licuados and salads. How we used to eat them

every day with sugar or chocolate or just plain.

How that might be the only thing we ate for dinner

or lunch or breakfast. He would steal them

and sell them door to door in the neighborhood

to buy tortillas and a gallon of milk.

How he watched the sun rise every morning

and watched it work its way across the sky

like him across the fields those first years in Oxnard.

He can't eat strawberries anymore

because the taste and smell just hurts too much.

David Campos

American Poetry Review, September/October 2011 (Volume 40/No. 5)

David Campos was born in Ventura, CA in 1984. He graduated from Fresno High School and continued his education through Fresno Community College before finishing with a degree in English at California State University at Fresno. He has worked as a cashier at a meat market, pizza delivery driver and now delivers medication for a pharmacy. His poem appears in In the Grove and The Packinghouse Review, among others.