We Need to Talk – a poem by Lynn Gicklich Cohen

We Need to Talk

To be inside this conversation
is to step through a threshold

of wilderness, no horizon in sight, 
across a boundary so antiquated,

its rusty barbs break off across our shins. 
The thickets and thorny patches 

along the path entice us 
with their bright, ripe berries,

inviting our bare hands into 
the clutches of teeth and grief and reason. 

We try to sneak in, are stung, and
retract. But the laws of foraging 

dictate that the choice of any crop 
lurks beneath its leaves. 

Listen, my love: Lacerations heal, 
but left unharvested, fruit rots on the vine.

Lynn Glicklich Cohen has been published in Amelia, Brushfire Literature 
and Arts Journal, Cantos, El Portal, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Peregrine, 
The Phoenix, SLAB, Spotlong Review, St. Katherine’s Review, Swamp Ape 
Review, Thin Air Magazine, and Trampoline. Her novel, A Terrible Case of 
Beauty, was published by Trebol Press in 2013.