The Raspberry Room

The Raspberry Room

by Karin Gottshall

It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny   

as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.   

It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen   

of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists   

in the wind, daring anyone to come in.  I was trying   

so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full   

of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was born

to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch   

in the back acre of my grandparents' orchard.  I was cross-   

stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker's needles.  The effort   

of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore   

my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded   

with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of   

the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry   

dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong.   

Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood   

made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing   

down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:   

just space enough for a girl to lie down.