I'd guess that food is such a ripe (to use a related term) subject for a good poem since food is essential, primal and it is linked to lust and love and life and creation and destruction.
In the poem, picking strawberries comes across as very violent what with her hands being "murder-red" and the fruits with their "bleed" and "rot". It's a contrast with the poem's only other subjects - children on a shore vacation with their mother.
Maybe her way of talking about strawberry picking is supposed to reflect the unexpected intrusion of violence on ordinary life? The inescapable darker side?
After all, at the end, if you pick a strawberry which is too mushy, too soft, you just abandon it to the ground to rot. You've got to see the darkness in life to avoid such a fate yourself. Don't get soft since the soft ones are abandoned and left to rot.
Seems awfully dark. Shoot.
Favorite line: "Ripeness / wants to be ravished"
