I am standing in your kitchen on the East side.
Snow falls just beyond the window,
and we are listening to The Splendid Table.
You’re slicing into vegetables we brought home
from the market. I took you there because I wanted you
to see it for yourself: everything is a wound.
I’ve been thinking about the woman selling meat,
arranging ribs, shanks, rounds on display;
I’ve been thinking about trailers hauling hides
up and down the New York Throughway;
I’ve been thinking about bone saws
gleaming in rooms we call parlors.
At the market, another vendor waited,
his offering an explosion of color:
green onions, purple nightshades,
beets that leave you bloodstained.
Poem takes its title from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
