Strawberry szn

It has been some weeks/days/minutes since the U.S. president threatened to end the world, a civilization, a species

Simultaneously, in the southwest portion of the country it is strawberry season–

which is to say that the strawberries grown in California or Mexico are ripening,

being picked and packaged then loaded onto trucks and driven here–

and therefore

I am making pound cake, to top with strawberries and cream,

baking to calm my anxiety about extinction(s).

In Japan they cultivate something like 56 unique varieties of strawberries

I doubt there is more than one variety grown here

I’m creaming butter and sugar but I’m thinking about Aleppo Pepper and

how 

if Aleppo doesn’t exist anymore 

how 

can I have a jar of its pepper in my spice cabinet?

how

can I have a spice cabinet while my country is bombing everyone, everywhere, all the time

Not metaphorically

and,

metaphorically 

If Lebanon doesn’t exist anymore because we were all soooooo dutiful in our paying of taxes, who replants the vineyards?

Who remembers Lebanese wine?

I’m sorry

this is supposed to be a poem about strawberries

and pound cake

Not colonialism 

and genocide

its just, 

everything seems so mixed up these days so far away and at my

fingertips its just so hard to 

focus 

Which is why I wanted to make you this pound cake, 

to focus on folding in flour,

to feel the glide of butter between my fingertips and the sides of a loaf pan

I wanted to feel the blast of heat from an oven and not think of bombs

I want

to apologize to the whole world:

We could have had hundreds of strawberry varieties everywhere they grow and instead we have

this