Blackberry Blackberry Blackberry, by Collin Garrity

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A blackberry bramble leans rigid over a stream, ignorant of the growing town a mile to the east. Each morning a young man arrives to talk at the bush, offering an unfiltered glimpse at his grief and uncertainty. Every morning the blackberry bush sits unresponsive and dependable, responding only to the slow-moving seasons in the customary way. Undeterred, the young man takes to asking the thornbush questions, curious about increasingly vulnerable aspects of the plant’s imagined feelings. Interest becomes jealousy as he begins to covet the lucky forgetfulness of the unthinking shrub.

After months of visiting in secret, the boy becomes content to simply describe to the blackberry what he has seen in the village each day. As the one-sided conversations become less intimate they also become increasingly incomprehensible. One morning, the boy makes his customary excuses to visit the spot by the creek, only to find the plant uprooted and missing.

Collin Garrity (He/Him) studied poetry at Warren Wilson College. He spent his childhood in Belgium and Germany, and now lives in St Louis, MO where he spends his free time renovating buildings. His poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Brussels Review, Columbia Review, Inscape Journal, Dialogist, Quiddity, Tar River Review and elsewhere.