Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s hand?
Othello

I.
When I first read of Desdemona’s lost
napkin, the one Othello gave her as proof
of his love and test of hers, I did not know
strawberries were not berries but false fruit.
I saw only the plump, red strawberries
from the organic food stand I worked at
the summer before college. How Jim would
come straight from his fields somewhere up the coast
from Goleta with bushels of red berries.
How I would eat a pint at work and dock
my pay and dream that the hippy, vegan
girls would notice me, four years their junior.
Everybody knows what strawberries look like,
the green Peter Pan collar cap, the red
cordiform berry that bulges at the top
and tapers away to the round bottom.
But I did not know that this ideal fruit
was an eighteenth century French hybrid
created from a cross of two American
species, the Virginia and the Chilean.
Shakespeare’s strawberry was a small button,
a little round O of sugar and joy.
I have read this play for years ignorant
I was haunted by an American ghost.
O that all American ghosts were harmless
as strawberries. O that all strawberries
were just strawberries, red and sweet and plump.

II.
Othello won, he says, Desdemona’s heart
with tales of wars against the Cannibals,
real American monsters, painted on
maps, a leg on a spit roast, a mother
feeding her child a barbecued arm,
and found in chronicles. For Columbus
they were proof he had reached the fabled spice
islands. He did not see them, just heard tell
of their living on the archipelago,
these anthropophagi and their false fruit.
O human heart, so eager to devour
what it does not understand. O, Othello.

-Jeremy Paden