Eggs

In college I ate hard boiled eggs almost every morning. From this habit arose a poem concerned with surface appearances and what lies beneath, yellow within white. This poem was originally published in the Students at Large online magazine.

Photo courtesy of Publicdomainpictures.net

Eggs

I carry hard-boiled eggs in my pockets, one in each.
She thought it strange, to carry an egg or two,
ignoring the fragility of those small delicate vessels.
I think it strange that she wears a heart-shaped locket
with some long-lost lover’s picture, lock of hair, essence,
Death on the inside. Me, I carry eggs. Simple.
They’re an insistence against my fingers, some secret,
concealed in hard-shelled symmetry. Incubated in a cafeteria,
carried to a sleepy classroom.

You’re cherished, egg, above all other foods.
Some days you’re boiled longer than others, and those days
you peel more easily. I take your potential life into my stomach
in a bite; sometimes more than one of you.
My hunger is three-headed Cerberus. Opals in my pockets,
Or the biggest pearls in the world, uniform in texture and weight.

I’ve seen you at the farmer’s market, egg,
trying to look inconspicuous, dark sunglasses and a hat;
no longer pure white but tanned brown from too much sun.
You look the other way. But I find you out, like always.
Gelatinous mass, creamy embryo, globular membrane,
don’t even think about making a peep down there
in my dark stomach.

She thought it strange
that what I peeled in class today wasn’t an egg,
but a boiled chick on a half-shell, peeping feebly,
steaming, coughing up water, crying for a mother.