Imagine That Moment When Chemistry Thrust Its Interlocked Molecules Between Us
Robert Allen
April 24, 2022
You stand in your father’s house, counting grapes
near a table laid out Super Bowl style
with chips, dips, sausage balls, and plates of fruit.
You complain, “These green and red sugar bombs
go straight to my hips.”
I think they look fine
but do not say. “That’s good sugar,” I say
and begin to list the grapes, berries, melons,
bananas, and pineapple chunks I eat
every day.
“Still too sweet for me,” you swoon.
I quote an article I read in Time
which argued it’s almost impossible
to eat too much fruit. “The fiber in fruit
forms a latticework on the small intestine
which keeps the sugar from being absorbed
right away, and it helps food molecules
reach the intestine’s end sooner, so you
feel full more quickly after eating fruit.
Hence, fruit consumption is
self-limiting.”
When your baby blues glaze over, I stop.
I think about the year my father died,
how my hands and even feet grew arthritic
that winter, and desperate for a cure
I sought out books on diet therapy
and discovered that eating pineapple
could alleviate my symptoms, as if
my father’s ghost were watching over me,
steering me to an answer.
“Outliers,”
I cry, shaking us from our reverie.
“That article did call grapes ‘outliers’
because they are basically little bags
of sugar.”
“Yes,” you sigh, “it’s a damn shame.
All this analyzing and scrutinizing
of each and every tiny thing we do
doesn’t help with living la dolce vita.
I wish we could go back to being infants.
Then, if you wanted to learn about something
you eagerly put it between your lips.”
Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and four cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.
