My Feeling’s Pyramidal by Julian Talamantez Brolaski

for a fee I guess
my sovereign entity
muckrake
frowning sun and yet it is a storyteller
maasaw liaison between worlds being like ‘here is my corn
& here is my planting stick    come only if you want the
simple life’
my own existence remained
none of my business and it had to do w/ food
I ate the apple even unto the core as my father
was said to have done, further, I ate the core
itself and thought moodily of arsenic
the trace amounts of it, I’d learned from
agatha christie novels, that lurks in the seed
but there is a happy thought to apples too
they are a part of the rose family
I guess arsenic is their latent thorn
muzzled by sweet flesh, accommodating to bruises
they say my father was never the same after he fell
out of that coconut tree
recently slept in a basement in boulder of someone who puts
cilantro in a cup of water, says it stays fresher longer
my mother doesnt eat at all or else she gorges
and—there’s no other explanation for it—purges
to the butter knife’s edge of death + lingers there
as if it’s soft as if it’s the butterdish itself
she’s fallen into + melted into the queendom of her own dominion
I broke into the sugar because the honey was gone
honey is a luxury
my lover brought me an almond joy because my tooth was sweet
the trader joe’s food was sad in its plastic bags
himalayan salt from peru, blood oranges in bags
two weeks later going stiff I squeezed
one into a salad for sweetness    hijiki shined back at me
the kale had been on sale for $1.66
today’s saturday
there’s no meat left and I have to get blood drawn
my feeling’s pyramidal from the frozen potatoes and the rice cakes
I mean ascended to a peak but crumbling
I eat the carrot to its root I even eat the root but not the greens
I tear them off
I know the carrots wilt faster w/ them on
memory of their verdegreen’s too much to bear