Spinach

I’m shoveling spinach into my mouth

delighting in its grassy sweetness.

And because the novel I just read 

is about the fallibility of memory,

and because I am stoned

I suddenly realize the reason I’ve left this delicious

source of summer chlorophyll and carbohydrate and whatever vitamins I’m craving the most right now,

slowly thawing for weeks in a vacuum-sealed bag 

is because of how we ate spinach last winter.

You had picked it all into big black garbage bags

in the early morning snow of the last day we would be able to harvest anything fresh and green.

And you wanted everyone to know you hadn’t picked the spinach just for yourself.  

But no one else was eating it.

So I ate it, we ate it, every time we ate together. 

Even though it had been frozen raw and unwashed,

so that we had to struggle to clean the dirt off before our hands began to freeze, 

and inevitably 

we would still feel the crunch of sand in our teeth.

And I ate it even though it had these horrible fat spongy stems, 

the result of constricting and thawing water cells 

in mature December veins.

I’ll concede, it was my fault that one time it was over salted.

And I guess it wasn’t your fault that you picked the spinach

and I didn’t like it.

It was just the way it was.

Now this spinach tastes like nutrient dense magic 

in the way that only a revelation can taste when 

you are high and rediscovering your own memories.

But even this magic spinach 

is leaking oxalic acid

an astringent film upon my teeth.