I ate picnics of peanuts and raisins, boiled eggs and
cucumber sticks
Mommy in her sleeveless dress, the thick army blanket, the
mango tree
I ate tuna fish from cans, spread on the bread that Tata
Ignace baked
In the kitchen, with its glass door pane renewed but my
wrist marked for life
I ate chocolate triangled and speckled white, the white
marbling swirls
Cold and melted and cold again. I ate it hiding under the
stairs
I ate pineapple upside down cake piece by piece straight from
the freezer
The freezer bloody with beef cuts. I'd seen half the cow.
Watched it cut up.
I ate grapes on Long Island in the Bible translator's hot
back yard
My first grapes. That yard, that day, they still come fresh
to me when I taste that.
I ate rice and peas and creamed tuna on my birthday year
after year.
Someday I will eat it again. I can't wait. But my mother is
dead.
I ate sugar cubes from the cupboard, its legs in tin cans of
water
So the ants couldn't climb. Sugar cube after sugar cube.
From the box.
I ate the grapefruit with the grapefruit spoon, drank the
juice from a squeezed arc
Rows of grapefruit in the dark pantry. I drew faces while
they rotted.
I ate peanut butter cookies, with their bumpy brown
topography
Endless craggy mountain ranges, flattened for me by my
mother's fork.
I ate the late-night subs, the smoky pizzas, the spaghetti
you cooked
Exotic raw egg yolk, your mother's handwritten words not yet
foodstained.
I ate the only vegetarian thing on the menu's back page
In so many restaurants. Ordering five drinks to make up for
it.
I ate rice cakes and cottage cheese when Weight Watchers
prohibited grapes
I dove into enormous green salads and forty-eight-ounce
smoothies.
I ate oatmeal for breakfast, enlivened with salt, bananas, berries
I ate it alone, in the dark of the morning, my ritual feast.
