On the theme of Groceries
NINE WAYS TO EAT A WATERMELON
Cut in half, with a spoon, immersed in a wartime movie. The Great War is best, followed by Vietnam, but any will do. Hopefully, there will be at least one passionate kiss before you hit the rind.
Off a paper plate, sliced in triangles, the fingers of your writing hand grasped around the green, the other hand under the table, to hide the discreet reserve of seeds.
Sucked through a straw placed in a hole carved with a penknife and spit into the trash can. Carefully, so as not to ruin the integrity of the rind. It is the best bong you’ve ever smoked.
In the fifth grade, on a class picnic. Jeremy, who everyone calls Germy, sits across from you in math. He tells you that if you swallow the black seeds a watermelon tree will grow inside your belly. You tell him that watermelons don’t grow on trees. It is years before you make t a drunken connection between “seed” and something similar in size to a watermelon growing inside your belly.
While nude, in bite-size pieces brought to you by room service. Eaten, suckled really, off your lover’s fingers on a soft, downy, all-white bed.
From a tiny golden fork at a party. Some juice sneaks down your chin and you can’t get to the napkins without passing people whose opinion of you really matters. You feel shame. You shouldn’t.
Alone on a hot Sunday night, in the kitchen of a penthouse apartment in a foreign country, while you listen to the strains of a singing competition from the TV in the other room. Chewing quietly, you think: American Idol in Chinese? Not American. Stupid. You swallow a seed, coughing softly.
Spooned greedily from the inside of a pail into your mouth, sitting on a mountaintop, wearing a dress made of a fabric that you don’t know, but is itchy as hell. Wait, isn’t this the dress your sister wore to her bat mitzvah? What the fuck is going on? You wake up in a cold sweat, the taste of juice still on your lips.
With a ghost.
Grilled.
Author Biography
Robin Silver lives in Shanghai, China. She is editor for the Shanghai based literary journal www.farenougheast.com. This poem was published first at www.haliterature.com.