Meter Monday: "Kitchen"

by Alice Xu

Water residue drips from the faucet,

slow, hollow taps as they thud

onto the corner of a coral basket filled

with chopped lettuce. Light illuminates

the calluses of his palm, shadowed

by my head hovering over.

I tiptoe on a ten inch stool, examining their lime

crusts and looseness, and the tender skin

that spell out ones peeled away. His calluses whisper

thirty years of hunger, all his stomach knew back then

in the farm of his father’s. In his mouth: the softness of juk,

boiled rice that scalded his tongue,

tasteless as burning numbed the bud.

I place my hand, pearl white and young,

over his, sunburnt and weary, the water

running dry across from us.

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