the first time you feed yourself
a hearty word like
beautiful
it will taste unconvincing and wrong.
salty,
fruitless rhetoric
still coats your palate.
eat.
until your belly is swollen.
until you are stuffed and confident.
eat
until you can't stomach
anything that doesn't feed you.
Copyright © 2018 by Roscoe Burnems. This poem originally appeared in Scene & Heard, January 2018. Used with permission of the author.