25.30 GLUTTON

NAPOWRIMO 30/30 Home-stretch poems.

GLUTTON

It is Spring in Nineteen-Eighty-Something.
A man and a woman are on their fifth date.
The trees are pouting their cherry blossom lips
at every passerby. Calves and shoulders flirt
out of hibernation. The sun charms freckles
from beneath the skin like a lighter to tics.
The birds come back North, to New York,
and the Ice Cream Truck toots its American Anthem.
Hypnotizing children out of their houses, away
from their baseball diamonds, they wave their allowance
money like the tongue of a hungry dog. The couple
on their fifth date watch  as a chubby boy teeters
down the street, the flesh tire of his middle poking out
between a striped t-shirt and khaki shorts
that don’t exactly meet. He sings his order:
a double cone. Chocolate and vanilla. Cherry-dipped.
Rainbow sprinkles. The cone looks like a carnival. And right
before he is about to lick his first heavenly lick, a surprise
of April’s cruel wind slaps it from his meaty fist. The street
is a massacre and the truck’s music is surely serenading another 
town by now. The woman on the fifth date knows there is nothing
more tragic than this. But the man on the date throws
his head back and laughs. Don’t worry he bends down
to the boy. You didn’t need it anyway. Pokes his lard.
A year later, the woman marries the man regardless,
even though she tells this story as if she said I do
to a convicted murderer. They will have a daughter. 
Inside her will live the little boy with the spilled cone. 
He will always be hungry. She will have her mother’s heart
and will always feed him. She inherits the venom tongue
of her father. After I bury the boy in food, more, more
I taunt him. You didn’t need that, fatty. Look at all that
chocolate on your face. Whose going to love you now?

-Megan Falley