food – Candleships

The scene.

Two women stand on the sidewalk sharing a chocolate cream puff,

Spines bent to me, ravenously protecting their feast.

Yellow oozes from their teeth,

Pastry rips softer than cotton, and

Sighs like the breaths of lovers escape their swallows.

A sign touting

Creative Office Environments for Inspired Minds

Hangs behind their heads.

I am sitting in a trendy hotdog eatery, people watching.

I do not plan on eating dinner

Or if I eat, I do not plan on eating mine.

How brave they are, I think, the women.

All women, really, but these in particular

With their tightly held treat.

If confidence is a rolling sea,

Womanhood is defined by pallor and green cheeks.

Your worst days spent slumped

Against the pillory of a toilet seat empty but heaving,

Your best days spent standing in a white dress

On the bow of a sailing ship, gorgeous and starving.

The story.

Feasting on street corners defies these teachings and

Pallor turns to Pallas. Femininity suddenly means hungry

And women lift the torch to carry inspired minds.

The children are happy behind the fence, you know.

This is all you’ve ever been told.

You see them run past, sometimes;

your face pressed to the wooden slats,

eyelid peeled back inside the crack —

sight reaching out to meet their running forms.

They will always know peace, you know.

While war has always torn your ground apart,

their side will never run dry of fleshy fruit

or the ripened ribs of those creatures they farm.

Knowing this, you look around your side.

There are no children playing here;

they sit listless in the dust, ground down by the countless

sticks and stones thrown over the fence in playful ignorance of whom they’ll hit.

If they hit you they’ll ruin you, you know.

This is all you’ve ever been told.

And still you watch:

the splinters in your cheeks of years and years of breathless watching

though the crack have made you bitter — the wooden shards have hardened you,

yet still you watch, wide-eyed in disbelief and longing.

Happiness has gone extinct on this side,

and happiness is spelled with leaves of gold on theirs.

Everything they stole from you was branded

with the gilded promise of a wish:

for bluer skies and cleaner air and food to eat.

And yet — and yet!

You hear the children cry.

The grass is always green for them and all you have is dust,

and still they whimper at their feast.

The children are happy on the other side, and so

they will never see your sallow eyes shrivel in this heat.

Their happiness is built on never seeing how they’ve come to rest their heads

on these stolen leaves of luscious gold.

That —

that

is how they di(n)e in peace.

Tag: food

I Womanhood

Happiness Is Spelled With Leaves Of Gold