Some afternoons, everything she touches
reminds her of how bodies are so soft
and so prone to splintering, even when she wields
chopsticks, toothpicks, tongs and teaspoons
to place and push the artichoke hearts
among radishes carved into flowers, and fluff
nests of curly herbs and bitter leaves for the eggs
festooned with sesame-seed eyes and slivers
of carrots as their beaks. With some people,
she can't helping wanting to claim that it's all
for the sake of her daughter, whether "it" is the it
of resolutely drilling fake pigeons and falling plates
to defeat the dreams that insist on plaguing
her nights with paper golems and phantom goons
or the it of donning lipstick and hose and heels
as a gesture not of submission but grace, the uniform
of the Sunday suppers she manages to attend. It
is indeed for her daughter — the being prepared
both for monsters and manners — but it is not all.
It would be a meal of only meat, just as a life
without her partner and child would be merely
a serving of stems. She scoops a spare olive
into her mouth, savoring its slide across her tongue:
salt. flesh. seed. The tray is a passable garden
but in the end, it is but an end — its meaning a matter
of preserves and pretenses, a prelude to the sustenance
both of bullet-winged joy and the yield of slow roots.

Peg Duthie works as a copyeditor in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poems have appeared in earlier issues of flashquake and elsewhere.