Blackberries. In the dream we were picking blackberries. Feeding them to each other off the stem, crushing them between our fingers, teeth, licking each other's lips and digits clean. I enjoyed this dream. We squished berries between our bare toes. You shied away from the bees and the beetles. I carried the basket. Useless thing. Mother wanted to make pies. Whose mother? What kind of pie? I dropped kisses into the basket and berries into your mouth and stained your tongue purple with my own tongue stained black and we danced in the fields, you running from the bumblebees and I laughing. Silly afraid of the bees, I thought. You slipped a berry between my lips and it stung me. I screamed. My tongue swelled up and filled my entire mouth. I watched your pupils gather strength. Your entire eyes filled with black, in horror. At me. I couldn't scream any longer. My tongue was too large. It ran out my mouth and gathered saliva at the base of my chin. You ran and ran and ran for Mother. A mess of legs and your cotton dress tripping you three or four times, berries running plum over the green field, like ink spilled. You ran down the hill and burst into the house, but there was no Mother. There was no home.

Tongueless, I wandered watching the brown woman in the long red skirt. The Mexican men whistled and clucked appreciatively as Mexican men do to brown women in the Mission. She flashed them a smile, her arms hanging onto hands full of bags bursting with mangos and bananas. There was a song in her step and her smile knew the words but wasn't telling. The woman looked like me. I could hear her thoughts and they were my thoughts. Her song was mine. I know the words by heart. But I'm not telling. I was watching her, too. I was hiding among the bananas and mangos. I was with her when she caught her breath at the beautiful red and yellow, caught her breath at the sign which told her she could afford them, could afford as many as she wanted to carry, away to home. Home, wherever that was.

The BART train. I woke from my dream, my head full of blackberries, my shopping day in the Mission. Mangos I was starving for, they smelled so ripe, soft to my touch like the flesh of you, my lover. I wanted to peel back their skin and suck on their juices. I hungered. All afternoon and the sun is setting now. But I had no knife. I carried them around all day dreaming of tearing back their flesh with my fingernails, with my teeth, smearing yellow pulp and juice all over my face and fingers. I imagined you'd be there to lick them clean, as you did the blackberries in the dream. There were no bees in that imagining. You promised not to sting me.

I don't know if there is such a thing as blackberry-mango pie. Perhaps we could invent one. We gave up our mothers a long time ago, so we'll have take care of ourselves and each other. That's okay--no one to yell at us eating more mango than we bake, no one to care if we mess up the kitchen in our sticky-fingered haste to share our secret songs mouth to mouth, without music. I'll write lyrics involving mangoes and dreams. You'll write lines that sting, but only sometimes. Only when I have the temerity to laugh at you. And we'll invent a home we never have to travel to, one we keep like kisses on the ever-expanding tip of our tongue.