Patchwork

You’re averse to eating

tuna. Calling it “Frankenfish.”

There’s a dozen different ones

in your stinky tin. Fins

inauspiciously

flaked past recognition.

My StarKist has been

opened with the

teeth of an electric

jaw—efficient as a table

saw, a lid that hangs by

a strand; as a cuspid

that is loose in second grade,

your rocking it back &

forth like grandma’s chair—

the one in which she knit—

until it drops in your

anxious palm.

Your father

lost four fingers

to a Rockwell—its wheel

you always feared and

with good reason.

You still envisage them—

there on the workshop

floor, gasping like sardines

upon the deck. Suffocation

isn’t so bad when you really

ponder:

no blood or mutilation—

leaving a lovely cadaver.

But maybe lunch 

is not the moment

for morbidity.

What you will say is

my mayo won’t fix a thing.

That basil’s for the birds.

Nothing will ever

save my poor man’s turkey.

I recall the Harris Tories—

telling those of us on welfare

to haggle over dented

cans—while they of course

ate sturgeon, legs of crusted

crab—suggesting that we serve it

with a side of no-name chips,

like pickle & cherry flavour.

If I made something ghastly,

I’d stay anonymous too.          

You drown your mac ‘n’ cheese,

with ketchup from Dollar Tree.

There are 25 tomatoes in a

bottle, yet that doesn’t bother you at

all. You mumble that it’s different 

through the mush of your

concoction:

Veggies are supposed

to merge—just like the cosmic Om.

I’ll wait until you’re finished

to speak of fruit. That carrots

are never plucked from pendent

vines. Ditto artichoke. 

Who’d eat such a thing, anyway?

I imagine an

obstruction in my pipes—a gag

then loss of air—from this

maligned, misunderstood monster;

people gathered in its

garden by the pond; torches

in their fists, pitchforks

by which to pierce its

quilted flesh.

Andreas Gripp

May 13, 2026

Daniel Zuchnik / Getty Images