Excess of Sweetness

“Forgive me/ they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold.” -William Carlos Williams I. In the darkened backseat of that Ford Suburban I cheated sixteen plums from their paper sack to love them unconditionally, each wet string and prickly core. Sated, I nursed my secrets until my mother reached her searching hand behind her, squeezed through the crinkles of a barren brown bag and gasped at her child’s purple smile. I didn’t know that plum pits are toxic, like cursing or bad manners, that they were filled with cyanide like the sin kisses of couples on soaps and the harder movies. At the hospital, I wouldn’t give them up. I had to hold my mother’s hand while they pumped my stomach empty, else the cores would kill me. II. It took three years to admit to my sister that I had given in to my first love. She sobbed and nodded, began to say the same, but I stopped her. It didn’t feel right, telling the truth, even then, after it was all over, after we had already gone bad. III. Maybe I can still take it back. Surely what he and I had done had not made anything; yet every time, we let the accident happen again, let ourselves fuse and grow together like Siamese strawberries. I would go home and hurl away the pinks and purples for shame’s sake, curl up and wait for consequence, for the toxins to settle deep in my pit and to begin to grow a sin.