Love tastes like warm miso soup
After going hungry all day
Love feels like the vibrations in your chest
When a base drum booms too close
Love sounds like flute vibrato
Inside a church sanctuary
Love looks like a pale yellow drop of food coloring
On wet watercolor paper
Love smells like when you come up from underwater
In a small, shallow lake with grassy banks
My mother’s kitchen really wasn’t so much.
It was the kids’ kitchen, the daughters’ kitchen, where red food coloring met peanut butter and dried milk and ice cream
in super-special surprises
and the big girls ate at one table and the little girls another
and the daughter who had to wash dishes after dinner got rewarded by choosing what everyone else watched on TV that night.
There were lots of green beans and broccoli, an occasional asparagus and a rare artichoke,
and the only dead thing was the flowers that Daddy never gave Mama
the time he forgot their anniversary.
When Grandma showed up that night, she found the kitchen just as foreign
as Mama did.
You reached me from far
Landed too strong
Scarlet juice flying in the air
Food coloring from the heart
Splashing in the breath of lost souls
I whipped rivers inwards
My cheeks dry outside,
floods in my pores
Lips tight like locks
I looked fierce
eyes as open
as defiant as my new shape could conform
Mocking the wrecking ball who came to
Demolish
And ended up melting in the heat of my
burning soul
Rainbow banana, we all tried to make the most beautiful one, the silliest one, the most disturbed one.
We used food coloring, all the bowls in my kitchen, and fingers which were soon all kinds of colors.
Our troop was competing in a contest which might lead to a girl scout badge being honored in our name.
“Rainbow” and “banana” were the first two suggestions, and they ran with it, being seven and eight.
This project was a dismal semi-success. The end projects were disgustingly weird, non-appetizing.
The girls did not realize it, they were shrieking and laughing, and loving the dye on their hands.
They were one hundred percent confident, and began designing the rainbow badge in their conversation.
I sat back and wisely kept my counsel, and naysaying opinions to myself as one particularly enthusiastic child announced that we would most undoubtedly be named troop of the world for this terrific idea.
Youth. Nothing like it. The enthusiasm and hilarity continued, as I quieted myself.
Jolly Rancher by James Edward Lee Sr.
Sugar-sugar-sweet
dyes-food coloring-sweet-sweet
hard pellet sweet drops
12/04/17
elementary science
we watched with wide eyes
baking soda and vinegar
a little red food coloring
emerge from a clay volcano
the foam erupting
moving fast
mixing these catalysts
consequence happened
our lives
like baking soda and vinegar
cause and effect
a mere chemistry experiment
some of us
not well-rounded chemists
make quite a muddle of it
not ever getting the concoction
quite right
i am convinced
some are not born chemists
maybe just decoration
red food coloring
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