Morsels of Dissent

“Eating is her subject.
While eating is her subject.
Where eating is her subject.”
– Christian Bérard, Gertrude Stein

I

Eating,
I picture myself in a kingdom
of shunned women,
saggy-breasted and loose-toothed,
hunched and anaemic.
The women are green and blue and
evolving.
Humanoid offshoots, puckered-faced
and hungry, hang from their hair.
They let me join the throng,
overjoyed for a helping hand.
We grind masala and peel vegetables.
We light a fire and stir the gravy.
Someone starts a song
that sounds like a call of peacocks
heralding the arrival of rain.

II

While eating,
we feign indifference to
the ghosts flitting about.
They are women too,
our grandmothers and their mothers.
The ghosts berate us for not saving
a share for their husbands and sons.
We remind them that the men
are at the entranceway, waiting
like mantises ready to ambush us,
their hunt.
We work our loose teeth
to finely grind our fury,
which we knead to make dough,
which we shape into women,
which we throw at mantis-men.
The men eat our fury.

III

Where eating
without remembering the forefathers
is a sin, we leave our family gods
in a lidded cauldron
where they bicker like inmates
under the passionate precipitation
of our cravings.
We are unremarkable with
the way we worship.
We forget our prayers
and forgive hunger’s swift return,
munching on the names of men
we purged.
The land begins to stir.
We sit in rows, stitching burlap sacks
to carry the harvested humanoids.
We will carry them like chattels
with spines cracked from labour.