.The Gun Moll.

I once fell for a fancy man;

a man so pale and
d e l i c a t e l y boned

that the first time I saw him

s t r [e t c h e d] out in my bathtub

he looked
like something that had been filleted.

Fancy Man was a salesman,
and we spent most of our nights
in expensive restaurants

where one glance would have told anyone
that we were poorly matched.

His plates were always an artful tableaux.

Crispy little birds --
hovering on pools of brightly colored purees
and cunningly arranged fruit desserts
encased in spun sugar cages

while mine

had a childish paint-by-number quality:
red meat and green vegetables
followed by a little something chocolate.

Fancy Man tolerated my indifference toward haute cuisine
as long as he could,

until the evening
he

r e a c h e d
across the table,

tapped the tines of his fork on the edge of my plate
and hissed, "You eat like a gun moll."

It wasn't as bad as it sounds.

He meant that I eat passionately,

with an appetite that comes out of desire
and not from what is fashionable in food.

And he was right.

We had different engines,
this man and I,
needed different fuels to stoke our fires.

His constitution could be satisfied by [ex]otic tidbits,
while my body craves someone substantial,
like steak—or more precisely, steak on the bone.