New Knives
Emily Gordon
New knives on new cutting boards
invite sliced boldness,
a boarding school of lined-up carrots
instead of flying truants destined
for lonely lives under stoves.
Potatoes can be slender,
translucent leaves of Japanese paper,
forgetting their bulging eyes,
their asymmetry that was all middle,
no Lady of the Long Neck.
An avocado sighs,
its skin barely cleaved,
its flesh in clean quarters
of buttery green.
Emily Gordon grew up in Wisconsin and California and is a longtime journalist and editor. Her poems have also appeared in The Baffler, The Women’s Review of Books, Painted Bride Quarterly, Indie Soleil, HIV Here and Now, Transition, and the Toronto Globe & Mail. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is a sound improviser for the Dirty Little Secrets show in New York City.