Andrienne Casalena

Gluttony: A Dinner Conversation

Platters piled high hissed and spat with buttery steam,
a sudden clatter of silverware. Somebody's bread must be broken,
grapes plucked, a roast skewered, potatoes and garlic and broccoli
and some fine russet pears just for show. Knives and bones
snapped together, napkins soiled, strewn;
life, after all, devours itself.

We are a mosaic of brass and mahogany and porcelain,
caught inside the hairline cracks, unraveling staircases,
atoms spewed like champagne bubbles, breaking bodies;
skin melts like candle tallow, knees sunken in sediment. We
cannot reach to reach ourselves.

We speak as if life were a spoiled fig lodged in our throats,
a fishbone, gristle and marrow. Our tongues
wag helplessly; we swallow one another-a fingertip here,
there, the whites of an eye. Spat back out:
a jigsawed amputation on the table. (See? My ear
is bleeding in your teacup. Your feet are mismatched. We are alone.)

Rims of jugs and wine glasses glint suddenly; out poured light
swims along the oak slats of the table. Voices beat like finches' wings
while faceless fingers and forearms reach, snatch, grapple, grab,
strangle across the burnished wood; even now we cannot see

how, speechlessly, we have consumed one another. Our words
are crumbs left lying underneath the plates.
Memory is a rotten whole in the gums.