Plantains

Plantains

If you feel hungry, your character might say she’s hungry.
So much of what we do feels automatic.

Just like how harming others can feel like breathing. We think
it happens without thinking; the brain signaling itself

before we catch, attributing it to muscle memory.

After storms, the backyard plantain tree grows and regrows.
Our neighbor says, “They always grow back.”

I don’t know what it feels like to be “collateral damage”
or a target.

I know what it means to do harm, though
I often don’t realizing what I’m doing.

I ate a tuna fish sandwich today.
It was the gas station kind with the sealed
cellophane top that peels back from a rigid, triangular box.

My whole world in that sandwich as I sat by the bay
worth a picture, my character no longer hungry.

The fish in my stomach unrecognizable as fish.

Once I read a story
where nothing stayed the same.

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Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in cream city review, The Feminist Wire, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, Gertrude, So to Speak, Nimrod International Journal, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. She lives in North Miami and blogs at FreesiaMcKee.com.

Photo Credit: Logan Tozzi, New Mexico Review Staff