Cheryl Julia Lee (b. 1991)
SELECTED POEMS
We Were Always Eating Expired Things
Part I:
We were always eating expired things. Milk, bread, biscuits, cake. We forgot about them as they sat around the house and just as they had gone bad, we put them in our mouths. Chocolates I brought back with me from Australia, cheeses in last year’s Christmas hamper, juice from the last time someone decided to go grocery shopping. We didn’t always realize they tasted funny - not everything curdles and a two-month-old orange can be just as sweet. When we did, it was usually too late. Sometimes it wasn’t. We finished what we had started anyway.
Part IV:
It wasn’t just the food. Things were always breaking around that time too. Cup lids, the chair in the study, my parents’ marriage, camera lenses, people. Or maybe they had always been breaking down but we didn’t notice until someone stopped fixing them. The pipes whined for the longest time. I don’t think they ever stopped. From the day we moved in, there was always water trouble; either the sinks choked, or the rain leaked in, or there was work to be done outside so the water was turned off for an indeterminate amount of time. Someone fell into the drain outside during a storm. The pipes made the sound of a recorder badly played, when the finger covers too much or too little of the hole and C sharp sounds like a whistle no one will answer to. If we tapped it on one side, it paused like it was taking a breath but then it came on again. We turned it into a game to see how far we could walk away from it before it started up. Like What’s the time, Mr. Wolf? played wrong. No one bothered to call the plumber. Maybe we all assumed there was no point since we were going to move out soon, even though we didn’t know when.
by Cheryl Julia Lee
from We Were Always Eating Expired Things (2014)
