Women who eat nothing but salad aren’t really women but figments of the culture’s collective unconscious. One day one escapes the walls of the basement’s television and bleeds her language all over the floor of the slaughterhouse. What did you expect? How many years could you spend eating iceberg lettuce and watching the shopping channel before you too would want to dress up as a 1975 era Patty Hearst and shoot fragments of the moon into the heart of the internet? Am I afraid to actually admit that this is just a story about the tiny mother who lives in my chest? Sometimes I catch her making a bed in my heart, polishing her gravy urn with patriarchy’s spittle, and I want to surgically extract her with a nanobot. But then I remember how little I understand about place settings, so I accept her dated meticulous ways. I open the liquor cabinet, watch her bathe in a lipstick-shaped glass.
Click here to read Joanna Fuhrman on the origin of the poem.
Image: “Leftover Lettuce” by Kurt Bauschardt, licensed under CC 2.0
- Photographing Your Salad Turns It into a Ghost - May 14, 2020