More poems about food and longing:


The Unmade Toast

On the second week
of the All Twig Diet,
I start to dream about food.
.
You wouldn't believe how much
protein there is in peanut butter,
the woman seated at my mother's kitchen
.
table tells me. I remember the round
table, gouged with the backs of steel forks,
and how it died violently by fire and I
.
begin to weep and thrash my legs. The deer
walk through the kitchen again, their
eyes blazing red in the headlights.
They tear at the blue checked curtains
made of dish towels above the sink.
The window there is so small it makes me
short and unable to grab the butter
and jalepenos on the top shelf
of the refrigerator.
.
Over my shoulder in the next room,
a clean-cut man in a dirty shirt
stares at shadows on a prison
wall with windows no one can reach.
.
The light is leaving us now:
the bulb burnt out again above the stove,
the lawn outside darkening,
and the woman puts her head in her hands.
.
There's something I want to say to her
about wheat bread, or perhaps about carbon
and its offspring, perhaps about the importance
of water in a balanced diet but when
it comes out, I'm talking about balancing
on a diving board, the high one
.
and I must crawl down
before the firemen arrive.