NaPoWriMo Day 20, 2022

Photo by Duncan Kidd via Unsplash

Today’s prompt challenges us “to write a poem that anthropomorphizes a kind of food. It could be a favorite food of yours, or maybe one you feel conflicted about. I feel conflicted about Black Forest Cake, for example. It always looks so pretty in a bakery window, and I want to like the combination of cherries and chocolate . . . but I don’t. But how does the cake feel about it?” (Full NaPoWriMo post available here.)

One of my favorite deserts is cherry cobbler. It’s mouthwatering and easy to make and I could eat it every single day and not get tired of it. That’s why I rarely have it, because I don’t trust myself. Here are a bunch of cherry cobbler recipes, in case you have a stronger willpower. Find below a potential cherry cobbler’s point of view, filtered through my own flawed perception. I don’t really think the creatures and objects populating our lives see us as particularly godlike. But I needed some drama, some manufactured mythology, so here we go: deicide.

Deicide with Cherry Cobbler on the Side


1.
It is always hope that leads me astray.
I want to be part of you.
You are so large,
I believe you encompass
the world. All my ingredients tingle
in their separate containers
when you walk by. Is it today
we become one
undiminished thing?
Something to please a god’s hunger?

2.
They say absence
makes the heart grow fonder.
So does presence and wine.
When you left
to buy someone like me,
except
ready-made,
I thought I would die.

3.
It takes a moment to understand
you’ve wasted your life.
We sat there in the shelved dark,
waiting for god to come home
with an impostor.
That’s how our plan was hatched.
How does one bring down
divinity? From then on, nothing
god put in god’ mouth
would provide nourishment.

4.
When you died, we confronted a true
godless silence.
A light had gone from the world.
A certainty. Were you
ever you? Few of us rejoiced. 
There were parties
no one attended, promises
no one would keep.
Some of us turned to rot
from neglect. Many blamed me
for wanting to be the sum
of all parts. Indivisible. Godlike.
Then came the new order. 
A god who scoured our world clean.
Someone whom, perhaps,
I could love.

5.
It wasn’t the flood that did us in. 
It was disinfectant. 
The cherries lost their souls first.
Milk curdled. Butter
went rancid. Flour succumbed
to the dark side,
crawling with weevils. 
Sugar and baking powder
lasted the longest,
but even they were tossed out
into the hungry maws
that swallowed my future.

6.
And here I am, emptied
of meaning. Whom am I to fill
to the brim with joy?
I know now I will never
become myself.
It’s a punishment fit for a traitor.
I welcome it.

7.
Are you still here? Can you see me?
I’m an almost-there taste
in your almost-there mouth.
I reside in the in-between.
Do you hate me? Despise me?
Are you afraid?
I accept to be feared if it means
to be seen.