We ate edamame,
nestling our skins in pools
of salt and spit, sometimes
sucking them—discarded
saline corsets—hoping
for grist we might've missed.
So when you shucked them in
the trash with an offhand
gesture, nothing remained
but the memory of two
empty bowls, incised to
match chapped lips singeing from
the monosyllabic
tang of every pod I'd licked.
Author notes
I was eating edamame beans* with a female friend of mine the other day and the image of discarded bean skins floating in salty spit made me think of a sexual relationship that's abandoned (perhaps coldly) by one of the participants.
A kind of William Carlos Williams pastiche (at the very least it's a "domestic confessional"; see "This is Just to Say", by W.C.W.) but the meaning is intended to be more direct than the poetry of Williams and poets of similar styles...albeit in metaphorical form.
This started as a free verse, but after completing it I played around with a constraint in order to pare down the language (and give it a nicer visual quality). The form is in tercets of six syllables per line (except the last stanza, which is a couplet and ends with a seven syllable line)
...and because it has 14 lines (and a sestet and an octet if you squint a little...and a volta) we'll call it a sonnet for shits and giggles.
Also, "the monosyllabic" is apparently an old euphemism. Just thought I'd put that out there...
Whatever. You like?
Cheers,
Y
* "Edamame beans" (the name is Japanese) are a soy bean you eat by salting and biting/sucking them out of their pods. In that order. I recommend them, very tasty! And good for you, for those of you who are health conscious.
Metaphor too subtle/obvious?
Comments
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Hello again Yossarian.Always a delight to readyour stuff. How you got the chapped lips image into this is a wonder...a wonderful concatenation of images, faithful to the dearest objective correlative!
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Ah! Thank you! I haven't been on the site in ages, so this is a tad belated.
Salt always chaps my lips, so it seemed like a natural inclusion, lol.
Cheers,
Y
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Cute write it was very different and when I read the bottom notes it helped me understand it more
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Awesome
The metaphor was great only because you were smart enough to explain the edamame beans. Otherwise I would have been going down a totally different path. The part that tell me it was well written is that either path would have worked great. Perhaps the other path would have called for putting this an adult category (just kidding). Very well done, Rhon
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