I
Plated piles of it.
The other kind of white meat shredded down to look like the realer kind of white meat that would totally keep us full, but we are more worried about totally keeping ourselves empty.
II
Together, we’ve finished-off entire wardrobes. Hers’ and mine. Tell our parents that it’s just the style, now when they express concerns over our tattered and torn clothes.
We blame it on the rayon-munching moths, ravenous underneath the closet-bulb’s watt’ed-rays.
‘On them being too old to understand that it’s not back in their day, anymore.
That it is our days that we must fashion from.
That to be less of something, today, is to be worth more of something, tomorrow.
III
Plated piles of it.
When I bite down on a tear, it wears down even further into a melted mush.
And when I want to ask.
And when I wish to ask.
And when I begin to think, to wish, to want, to ask through the brief breaking of my cumulous hunger cloud—The real food thing...just this one time?
She says, will you pass me the tomato sauce?
Dips a squirming strip into it.
Spins it—spoon and fork—to slurp the silk noodle up.
See...? You can hardly tell the difference.