Thank you for feeding me
when food tastes like ‘apathy’
Before it even hits my tongue.

Thank you for picking up a knife when I can’t
carry myself into the kitchen
Let alone open the fridge;
I’m so overwhelmed by the same fucking choices
I, somehow, have to make every day.

I mean, sometimes it’s almost two PM
And I haven’t had a drop of water,
Surrendering fifty-five percent of myself
To all the other things that won’t matter
When I’m dead.

I tell my mother that I’m struggling to eat
Because the produce I buy with
Such good intentions can’t compete
With my own affinity for rotting
slowly away.

Now, my mother is an excellent cook,
self-taught, wondrously curious
In the way she turns a grocery list into
tender, savory, decadent pieces
of her love.

But when I tell my mother about my
cubed cantaloupe, sold for three-dollars a package,
I hear years of budgeted survival in the
sigh that she lets out.

As a kid, I resented our store-brand fridge,
our chaotic pantry of sensibly priced knock-offs.
I was warned young to save every possible cent at the expense
of shortcuts or ease, because short cuts and ease
Have never fed a family of four. 

And It’s with that instinct, stuck on like old,
blackened grease
That she tells me not to waste my money
On something I could peel and cut
And accomplish myself.

But I am grown now.
Overburdened, yes, but guiltless
In my endeavor to eat
Any fucking fruit
At all.