Fran Qi

Poetry

Fran Qi is a lost engineer and a renewed writer based out of San Francisco. She writes some fiction, but mostly poems, published in Sky Island Journal, Orange Blossom Review, Dawn Review, Cincinnati Review and elsewhere.

 

blueberries

in season. elbows on the kitchen counter, chewing over retrieval and cycles and odds. each berry plump, bursting of promise and sweetness lined up 24 in two rows on a dishtowel. saying if each is an egg, if each is thawed or kept frozen, if each were a dormant, luscious life. pregnant with choices and decisions—can you call a donor a lover? this man is 6'1" and runs. this one is 5'10" and studies law but is he curious does he laugh unbounded do dogs fear him is his voice a thunderstorm coming or going does he love summer fruits best, purple and wild? there are no answers and no romance. eat the questions, chase with blueberries, worry the seeds from teeth later.

My friend and I stand in her kitchen eating blueberries and strategizing how many eggs should she freeze, should she go through another round, and at what cost. The blueberries present themselves as a poem as we line them up on the dishtowel, futures laid out before her.