Breakfast for Two

My name is Alexandra but I go by Lex—yes, as in Luthor. I’m a senior and will be graduating in May with a  bachelor’s in English Writing and a minor in Sustainability. I was born in Texas but also lived in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Montana before settling down in Idaho to finish my degree at Boise State. Like most of the other English majors I know, I chose to pursue this degree because I’ve always loved reading and writing. I’m told that as a toddler I dazzled my babysitters with compound sentences and big words like “precipitation”; now I want to use those big words to get into graduate school and earn my Creative Writing MFA. Eventually I hope to work for a company promoting sustainability and to write creative nonfiction about food and environmental issues on the side. When I’m not attached to my laptop, you can find me at the farmer’s market or at my day job pouring coffee.

Breakfast for Two

I’ve decided to name this cluster Fear; this blooming bud.

We eat those, you know—capers, artichokes, honeysuckle: delicacies

of the not-yet-born;

flowered,

devoured.

I spoon cereal into my mouth like an automaton,

a shell, a vessel, and imagine cynara scolymus

sprouting in my belly;

artichokes are thistles, did you know that?

It would be a thorn-hedge forest,

the kind a prince hacks through in a fairytale.

And I think:

When I eat, I’m feeding Fear.

When I sleep, I sleep with Fear.

When I wake, I wake to Fear.

I look down to see the cereal in my bowl

has dissolved—

my spoon swims,

solitary,

in a sea of once-white milk.