My old friend Lee Ann Brown wrote this poem about Polk Salad in her book In the Laurels, Caught.  She wrote it from notes jotted on a day with the herbalist Mary Morgaine Thames, in North Carolina, learning about wild plants.

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POKE SALLET

is cooked not raw

stay ahead
              of the red

Eat in spring
cook when 6 inches or less

lymph cleanser

2 boils

Do Not drink the potlikker

Eat the berry

1 on the 1st day
2 on the 2nd day
3 on the 3rd day

How far do you
spit out the poisonous seeds?

become a dynamic accumulator
bringing up minerals from below

Children in a school near here used poke ink
It was that with which they wrote

any daughter paints her arms

the way to play the plants

on paper the unfixed juice goes from bright magen-
ta to a dried blood color

the man who built our house

first dreamed of a pokeberry sky

but after a hot day of crushing berries
and smearing the boards, gave into Benjamin Moore

it’s “hard to fix”

that color more bright than cochineal