Poetry: “How to eat muscadines,” by Anyonita Green

How to eat muscadines

She taught me how to eat muscadines barefoot
down by the crick, where their vines tangled 
around the trunks of pine trees and flowering dogwoods
with velveteen petals, that missing notch
like Nature had taken a bite to savour.

She chose a good vine, where each muscadine
hung low, almost sweeping the pine needles 
carpeting the ground. Grapes sagged under their
own weight, like marbles, some big as plums—
deep red, almost black, fatigue green, fat
and fleshy, thick skinned. 

You can chew the skin, eat it up like regular grapes 
or break it, like cracking into a sunflower
seed, and suck out the juice and flesh, spit the skin
onto the ground, leave it for the birds. 

She worked quickly, foraging muscadines, filling
the wicker basket we used to gather pecans,
plucking them from the autumn ground 
before the frost came or the Carolina chickadees pecked 
the fruit of each nut. Her hands passed over small grapes
to select perfectly round baubles, some clean enough to eat 
straight from the vine, others brushed with a dusting of gold pollen 
she’d wipe on her dress.

With her basket full, we sat under the shade
of a pink dogwood, sucked the tender meat
from each grape, some bitter, some sweet
as cherries, runaway juice escaping
to our elbows, wetting our mouths so that later 
when we kissed we only tasted muscadines.

About Anyonita Green

Anyonita Green is a Black American poet and essayist based in Manchester, UK. She holds an MA in Poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work explores the body as a site of memory, desire, and inheritance, with particular attention to Southern girlhood, queerness, and sensory experience. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Propel, and HerStry.