she popped strawberries onto her fingers,
gobbled them off
pop pop pop pop pop
but she realized halfway through
that when her lips had wrapped around
the gritty things,
(the bigger than itty bitty, nitty gritty things)
and sucked in to bite,
the tips of her fingers
(plump and fleshy, red and juicy)
were sucked in too!

later in the evening,
she felt a chill
as she finished off the last
of her strawberry fingers
(because, why not?)
with stumpy hands,
she reached across herself to
rub away the shivers,
but her skin was colder and moister,
like something growing on a rock under the sea,
and when she looked at her arms
there she saw her goose bumps were the bumps
of blackberries!

that night in bed,
she tucked in and
wiggled her toes
they felt odd, fatter,
more like rubber balls.
and when she pulled back her sheets,
she saw they were blueberries!
increasing in size along the toe line,
cool as marbles

when she woke the next morning,
she looked in the mirror and found:
fingers were stacks of strawberries, toes
rows of blueberries.
her lips red as cherries –
well, as everything as cherries;
her hair strands of raspberries
that slapped gently against her sweet cheeks like
a fish’s final flop, skin turned
entirely to blackberries, and
her chest was still plummy,
made of a mound of purple plums

she was pretty as a peach.
and when she walked down the street,
people passing by couldn’t help themselves –
they plucked raspberries from her head
and handfuls of blackberries
from the small of her back,
eating them, juice tracing their chins.
“she tastes good!” they marveled,
teeth sinking into the kiwi where her knee
would be
“delicious!” a stopped cyclist agreed,
eating the berries from her feet

they ate through her sweet skin,
worked their way through her insides too,
some people eagerly leaving to find bread
to dip in the jam she bled.
they ate all the way through,
until all that was left was her peachy heart,
soft and so delicate, tender thin skin.
but they ate that too,
and left only the pit.