Strawberries
Poem of the Week (Poem, History, Analysis)
— Table of Contents —
1. Poem
2. Author
3. Summary
4. Analysis
5. Sources
1. Poem
Strawberries
By Gabrielle Bates
A car’s tires thu-thunk
over the rubbery black trip wire at the oil change,
triggering a fat bell,
and a group of girls in silver leotards are reflected
like spatters of sap in its windows —
liquidine, firm, gleaming.
It’s a Game Day; they are the girls
chosen to split in tempo to the brass band,
heel of a front foot sliding over Astro-Turf,
top of a back foot grinding over lit green,
cervix slapping the fifty-yard line
like a fried egg flipped down on a griddle to burn.
Behind the bleachers, a boy takes off the shirt of another boy,
paints a letter there in red paint (R,
and then another boy I-O-T . . . ).
When the sun goes down over the ridge
all the painted boys will make PATRIOTS.
For now the sun rises, sanctioning the street:
Jiffy Lube, pet store, the Sam’s Super Sandwiches
teens file into, practicing the joke of language —
I love you . . . I like your faded shirt . . .
The morning is cool on the outside
and hot in the restaurant, the war in the words
playful as a war can be, meaning
each gut bleeds out like a slit pig’s,
filling the cracks in linoleum, spilling over, becoming smooth.
The layers of red dry and build on one another,
and for years the gap between ceiling and floor lessens;
backs hunch as the mind saws downward, revealing rings.
In the parking lot, Are you asleep?
says the boy who is not my boyfriend,
running his fingers along the band of my underwear.
Across the street from this, for years,
an ancient tortoise roams the floor
of the pet store, closing his army-green beak
around the red toenails of sandalled women,
thinking them strawberries.
I feel ashamed for all the people
I’ve been kind to knowing kindness
is all it will take.
2. Author
Gabrielle Bates is a young poet from Alabama currently living in Seattle. She works for Open Poetry Books, is cohost of the podcast The Poet Salon, and will be publishing her debut collection, Judas Goat, in 2023.
If you liked this poem, my personal favorites are “The Dog,” “Dear Birmingham,” and “The Mentor.”
3. Summary
In the beginning, the narrator is getting an oil change at Jiffy Lube when she notices a poster on the business door. On it are several girls adverting the Big Game Day in a sensual and provocative way. She tries to understand the appeal that this has to a certain group of people and imagines what it would be like to attend the game.
Shifting back to the present, she notices teenagers, and their almost whimsical interactions. Here she mentions the three locations of the poem: Jiffy Lube, Sam’s Super Sandwiches, and the pet store.
After she escapes back into her mind, an abstract scene of pigs’ blood filling Sam’s Super Sandwiches is described. The blood is filling and smoothing cracks, and it is close to reaching the ceiling.
Shifting possibly to a past experience, the narrator then describes what is probably a one-night stand with someone, even though she has a boyfriend.
The last image is of the pet store across the street from Jiffy Lube, where a turtle bites a woman’s sandalled toe.
The closing remark is, “I feel ashamed for all the people I’ve been kind to knowing kindness is all it will take.”
4. Analysis
“What’s it going to be then, eh?” Alex asks in A Clockwork Orange. It’s a question Gabrielle Bates also poses in “Strawberries,” where destruction is enjoyable— a pastime that perpetuates lasting pain.
The Astro-Turf, girls’ enthusiasm, football crowds, and flamboyant appearance represent the fake cheer that most people label as fun or polite. The illusion of the strawberry, that in reality is probably the name of the polish, exemplifies the odd comfort humans get from not having genuine conversation, even if what’s true goes unsaid. The pacifier that kills. People are left eating nail polish mistaken as fruit because they haven’t seen something so real in a long time. The hyper stimulated world, and the need to be bigger, better, and bolder is partly to blame (the want to be “gleaming” and “silver.”) So is the complacency of willing to receive something fast rather than true. But it’s mostly desperation — desperation for something happy and satisfying. Empty experience with little substance. And the little bits of passion humans sometimes manage to show, Bates writes, is normally violent. We flip-flop between discordant ideas — “I love you,” and “I like your faded shirt.” Between full and empty, there lies indifference.
It’s also clear that Gabrielle is talking of Americans, in particular. I had never realized that the word RIOT is engraved into the center of the word PATRIOT. But whether this depiction of most Americans is true or not, the people in the poem are very real and very alive.
Like in other poems of Bates, there is also a feminine aspect to “Strawberries.” Women are seen as consumable. Through posters that advertise sex appeal to the rhetoric of “caramel skin,” “sweetheart,” and Bate’s own comparison of a Cervix to a fried egg, the fetishization of women can be seen almost anywhere.
(I would also like to say that while we do fetishize the type of woman Bates describes, the counter people are using to deflect misogynistic stereotypes is not effective. By degrading the girly woman, the same problem of trying to build the perfect model before an entire group of people occurs. With the endorsement of the tom boy, and independent woman, we limit what a girl should be to traditionally manly qualities.)
Finally, Bates asks how much blood has spill to fill the cracks. How much blood will spill before illusions of cleanliness and smoothness contradict what humans know is true — that pain used to obtain blood and that it’s not just paint. How long will it take, too, for minds to become blank with red? And if they do, will someone be brave enough to cut the dried blood to find the gruesome truth?
As far as the closing sentence, “I feel ashamed for all the people I’ve been kind to knowing kindness is all it will take.” Kindness is all it takes sometimes to not feel accountable for the many, many crimes we’ve committed as humans.
The clock is ticking, and the orange is slowly rotting. So is the strawberry. Well, if it wasn’t made of nitrocellulose dissolved in a solvent.
5. Sources
- Strawberries’ Initial Publication on The New Yorker
- Who is Gabrielle Bates?
- The Dog (Poem and Interview)
- Dear Birmingham on Poets.org
- The Mentor poem
