I sit alone at the kitchen table. Everyone else
is in the living room, watching TV or reading
or slowly coming unglued. But I have to sit
with my uneaten food, which is getting
less appetizing the longer it sits with me,
congealing, going cold and limp and soggy.
To be released I must clean my plate,
which might hold three bites of hotdog,
half a slab of meatloaf, a single fishstick,
or any one of the many ways in which
I am a disappointment to my parents.
Both my elbows are on the table, a tiny
protest no one can see. My forehead
is in my palms as I stare at my plate,
willing my eyes to blur the food away,
which doesn’t work, never worked,
not with food or any other awful thing
someone tried to shame me into swallowing.
I prolong the ordeal by taking the smallest
incremental nibbles. Though I am hungry,
I can’t bring myself to fill my mouth
to gagging to make this pass more quickly,
and in hindsight, it doesn’t matter—
the time passed. This is all in the past
as I look back through the darkened window
of history to remind myself how young
I began eating alone and how good at it
I’ve become. Look, my plate is clean.
–
Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook Bright Glint Gone won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her poems have recently appeared in Whiskey Tit, Rust + Moth, Cider Press Review, and Menacing Hedge. She holds an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College and teaches high school English in Falmouth, Maine.